Monday, August 30, 2010

Concept Of Alphabet Outrages Morons.

A few years ago I remember seeing a letter in Viz demanding that Alphabetti Spaghetti be banned because of all the filthy words that could be found within. This seems as though it is meant to be seriously though:

THE News of the World is spelling trouble for Scrabble bosses - after we found the game allows players to use vile racist insults.

Let's ban the alphabet to stop these vile words being produced, won't somebody please think of the children.

5 comments:

JuliaM said...

Oh, look, and a 'top anti-racism charity' wants the abusive insults removed.

Well, that's presumably possible in the electronic versions (ensure the coding no longer accepts them as legitimate words) but I can't quite see how he thinks that could happen with the board game. Unless you want to play it with about 5 letters.

Ross said...

Presumably even on the electronic version there are racial epiphats which have dual meanings which could still slip in.

Macheath said...

At last! An argument to use against my Mother-in Law, who has memorised the entire official list of two-letter words (gi, xo, ea and so on) and uses them ruthlessly: "Listen, dear, those people at Scrabble know what they're talking about so if they say it's a word, it counts!"

From now on, if she's going to have 'bu' and 'ig', then I claim every right to counter with 'f***' and the rest, as endorsed by Mattel.

James Higham said...

Stop the world - I want to get off.

Budvar said...

You mean I'll no longer be allowed to use perfectly good words like, "Spade" "Spick" "Coon" "Chink" "Pikey" or "Cracker"?
Words that in their own right have no racial connotation.

Don't get me started on the word "Paki".
(OK too late) A "Paki is a native of Pakistan, as the suffix "Stan" translates as "Land of".

Calling someone a "Pakistani" is the linguistic equivalent of calling someone Englandish, Scotlandish or Walesish.

A native of Afghanistan is not an Afghanistani, but an Afghan or Afghani.

A native of Uzbekistan is an Uzbek.

A native of Tajikistan is a Tajik.
You get the general idea.

As for the word "Nigger" or "Negroe" guess what, they're from the Latin and Greek word for Black.

Slave in Latin is either "fugo" the root of "Fugitive" or "Ancilla" the root of "Ancillary"

Slave in Greek has several roots, but the most likely is "Slav" as in Slavic people.

Interestingly enough, another is "Oiketes". This to me, conjures up the image of a female Oik of about 12..