Banned Scrabble words

Cafe Society
61

A lot of terms are acceptable/unacceptable based on the time they’re used, right?

If you used the term “negro” with a black person it’s ok today…as long as you’re talking about the United Negro College Fund or that provocative film, “I Am Not Your Negro.”

“Colored”? Sure. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

So there are very narrow contexts in which the terms can still be used. Like that bundle of wood term I mentioned before, though—you’re on mighty, mighty thin ice. In comedy especially, people try to skate on the edge, and what’s hip or funny today can age pretty quickly.

The network vetted the episode and aired it. If someone is dropping an n-bomb caliber word on females who aren’t Jewish, I’d like to know it, in the sense that I’d rather have a joke explained to me than to laugh along, pretending like I got it. Even if it’s “so 25 years ago.”

I know posts in here are hard to read for tone sometimes—I’m not offended, just musing. We are in the midst of this BLM and #metoo and statue toppling, hoaxers and all that. It’s funny how some things make it under the radar. A quote popped into my head from “When Harry Met Sally.” Billy Crystal says about taking a date to an Ethiopian restaurant:

#starvationisntfunny

Does comedy get a dispensation? Seinfeld joked about anti-dentites…I knew a woman who passed out peanuts on airplanes and I assure you, she got instantly pissed if you called her the S word. #airhostessdamnit Maybe professions are next.

62

I’m not claiming Seinfeld got away with “dropping an n-bomb”, nor do I necessarily disagree with @Jeff_Lichtman’s explanation. I know basically nothing of Yiddish per se, but I do recognize the Hebrew word “sheqetz” which is glossed as “detestable thing” (for example impure/non-kosher meat, as he explains), and would definitely be offended if someone called me something like that, hence its unsurprising inclusion in the bad-words list in question. Anyway, it would be meant as an ethnic slur, even if the exact degree of offensiveness is to be determined.

It’s notable that the derivation is from an ostensibly pejorative word, unlike your various n-bombs which refer to colour which is not literally something bad.

63

I know that; just that it never occurred to me to wonder if “foghat” was a thing or not, and if so what kind of thing, until Bender referred to himself as having (randomly) chosen “foghat gray” for his finish. So for 15 or so years I’ve been assuming it was a thing that was gray.

And now I find out that it was a made up word all along! Which kind of means the Futurama line has to be a reference to the band. I’m not familiar with their material (looking at their Wikipedia page’s listing of their greatest hits, none of them are recognizable to me by title), so I’m wondering aloud, what is the association meant there between “foghat” and “gray”, or is it just nonsense as well?

64

I am also non-Jewish, but grew up in an area rich with them (in Queens and Manhattan, NYC - just like Seinfeld!). I definitely heard the term “shiksa” used semi-okingly rather than venomously or derisively, but not from/between Jews - in fact, now that I think about it, often used in SELF-reference. It’s one of those things where someone who’d been called a “shiksa” took away the idea that it was the term for “a goyish girlfriend a Jewish boy is dating” (with overtones of “…which he oughtn’t be doing”) and ran with it.

It was kind of on a par with being called a “floozy” by an old lady when I was a teenager in the 1980s. OK, maybe to her the term is redolent with overtones of shame, Shame, SHAME!!, but to the ears of the target, it was taken more of a sign of how out of touch the old lady was. It didn’t carry any bite.

A recent column in Salon (well, not so recent any more - it was from 2013) talked about this. The context was a “hate/bias crime” complaint lodged with the police in Toronto, Canada, the only one that month categorized as “non-Jewish” (meaning, targeting someone for being non-Jewish) was someone who got called a shiksa, so clearly the person in question was pretty upset about it.

But it goes on to reflect,

Is “shiksa” pejorative? … The common understanding of “shiksa” (i.e., “a vaguely-pejorative term for gentile woman”) might be technically right, but it sieves out everything interesting about the word: the complex and layered notions of sexuality, its containment of both self-righteousness and self-loathing, the embedded yearning for and guilt of assimilation — in short, all the accrued (if often discarded) cultural valency of a word whose meaning has increasingly strayed from its Old World origin.

If you are not Jewish and know less than a dozen words of Yiddish and are nonetheless familiar with “shiksa,” then you yourself are an indication of how far the word has come. …

I remember finding the article fascinating because I really had not thought of the word as particularly vicious or hateful, but then again I am not a woman who’s ever been called one in that spirit.

It also notes that in modern Israel, the term is often used by the “ultra-Orthodox” Haredi Jews for a non-observant (enough) Jewish woman.

65

Shiksa in Yiddish means something like “female abhorrence.” Basically, something disgusting and dirty that is also identifiably female. The closest English word that captures what a nasty word in Yiddish it is, is the c-word, but “shiksa” also has the connotation of the thing being ritually impure, or somehow impious, or even unholy.

There is a Jewish law against Jewish men marrying gentile women, so one who is pursuing or has enticed a Jewish man (which is any gentile woman he brings home, according to his mother), is unholy. In the Middle Ages, some people believed that dybbuks took the form of seductive, gentile women in order to entice men away from religious practices.

There is no similar law for Jewish women, but that doesn’t mean families don’t get equally upset when daughters want to marry gentile men. The term for an impious and nasty man-- particularly a gentile man pursing a Jewish woman, but not limited to that-- is “shaygetz.” Anymore, the term is pretty much reserved for gentile men, but it did once get used for Jewish men who were generally dickish. It’s about a 1/2 step below a “shmok,” or “schmuck,” if you like that spelling better. That word, BTW, is so nasty, I was not allowed to say it when I was a child. It’s pretty much the Yiddish equivalent of mother-f*ckr.

Now, Seinfeld is totally a show, where, if you could get it past the censors, characters would be throwing words like the c-word, and mother-f*ckr all the time, including self-referentially.

In fact, the way lots of really terrible Yiddish words got into English as somewhat mild, is that the comedian Lenny Bruce used them in his act, because the censors didn’t know what they meant, and were always censoring him for using 4-letter English words. Gentiles heard the Yiddish in Bruce’s act, and could just guess at the meaning from context, while assuming that if they got past the censors, they couldn’t be that bad.

I’m sure that some shiksa went to her in-laws’ home in the 70s, and shocked the crap out on her husband’s grandmother by tossing around “shmok,” “shtup,” and “fakaktah.”

66

Didn’t the latest round of removals stem from someone challenging the word “Jew” as being capitalized, then, after being told that it was a legal play, realizing that while the noun “Jew” was capitalized, it was the verb “jew” (I think the meaning is, “to bargain for a reduced price”) that was being accepted?

67

Really, that traces to Lenny Bruce? That was before I was born, but I can tell you that growing up in NYC in the 1970s-80s, I absorbed enough Yiddish from teachers, friends, not to mention TV and radio (not including Lenny Bruce but surely his creative descendants, including Seinfeld) that an Israeli co-worker of mine was very amused that I “knew more Yiddish than he did” (I’m Chinese-American, too, for added humor value).

But a fair amount of that appears to be vulgar Yiddish. In addition to relatively harmless things like referring to my commute being a schlep, complaining about getting schmutz on my jacket, declining a second bagel because “I would plotz”, words I later found out were quite rude to a native Yiddish speaker or someone with an actual Jewish background (as opposed to Yiddish-as-loanword goyish user by osmosis) were terms like schmuck, putz, and yutz (which I’m sure have a spectrum of offensiveness in Yiddish, but as loanwords seem relatively interchangeable).

I learned “schtup” from Mel Brooks movies. Along with schwanz, a term a co-worker of mine was once fond of saying, thinking nobody else knew what it meant, then was surprised we all knew what it meant (and a little embarrassed). I mean, that’s even a line in Young Frankenstein. “He must have an enormous schwanzstucker!” “Well. That goes without saying.”

I also remember a friend of mine in elementary school throwing around the term “mamzer” in third or fourth grade for a week or two, until apparently he did so in the hearing of an adult who Set Him Straight, because he solemnly told a small group of us non-Jews who were beginning to imitate him “no, really, don’t say that any more”. Later in life it turns out he was having fun getting the goyim to say bad stuff they didn’t understand. Ha ha!

As far as “shiksa” goes, it’s interesting that it’s far, far better known a term than shaygetz. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said out loud, though I have read about it several times.

68

I think I must have misread the dictionary entry I found when I hastily searched for the word. The word ginzo is “from Guinea” (i.e, derived from the anti-Italian slur Guinea), not a person from the country of Guinea. I was aware of the slur Guinea but didn’t make the connection.

69

That makes sense - outside of ultra-Orthodox enclaves, most Israelis know very little Yiddish beyond the few words that have become embedded in modern Hebrew, like the ubiquitous “nu”. Yiddish today is mostly seen as an American thing.

70

Thanks for the info. I’m guessing other women (Hindu, for example) would also be classified as shiksa?

Dictionary definitions often don’t convey the connotation etc. Wikipedia says of “Blazing Saddles” (1974) that it starred Madeline Kahn as Lili von Shtüpp,

So again…there it is. If you don’t speak the language, the basic meaning can be guessed at, but not always the emotional impact. And movies traditionally had more latitude than network TV. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, so I was looking at the parental advisory in imdb. Wow…

Several derogatory terms are used the movie especially towards the Asian and Black community, and may offend viewers. Other language is also included (3 uses of goddamn, 1 use of twat, many uses of shit, other milder words, one inaudible (mouthed) F-word). Many uses of " nigger," but the racial slurs are used by characters who are obviously the villains and/or fools in the story.

71

This is one of those answers where I really wish I could say “+1.”

I was in Israel about a year and a half ago, and of course I used quite a bit of Hebrew; albeit my Hebrew is mostly biblical Hebrew, I can stumble around the kinds of things tourists need to ask. However, I found my Russian quite useful as well in many shops there. But I spoke no Yiddish, I spoke Spanish to three different people-- two Venezuelan Jewish refugees I met, and a tourist from Spain, and even spoke ASL to a group of American Jewish tourists I ran into at Yad VaShem, but no Yiddish. Not even on the one religious kibbutz we visited.

The largest groups of Yiddish speakers are in the US and Canada.

72

No. You are misunderstanding. A “shiksa” is not simply a non-Jewish woman. That would be a “goyah,” or “lo-yehudit.” When a gentile woman is referred to as a “shiksa,” she is a woman who is, in the eyes of a Jewish man’s family, attempting to lure him away from the family to a life as a false gentile/unobservant Jew. Any non-Jew could do this: Hindi, Ba’hai, Roman Catholic, Apostolic Pentacostal, Mormon. She could be the blonde stereotype who attracts men by being different from a Jewish woman in appearance, or she could be Indian, Chinese, Ugandan, or a very dark-haired, olive-skinned Italian Catholic.

Of course, you understand that the “In the eyes of his family” is BS. He may have pursued her relentlessly, or it may have been an instant mutual attraction. Her only chance to be accepted is to convert, an even that won’t work if he’s a Cohen or a Levite.

However, an historical factor to understand is that back when husbands essentially owned their families, and an abuser or alcoholic could starve his children, Jewish men looked very attractive to women whose fathers were screw-ups, or who had been burned once by an ex.

Statistically, Jews have a low rate of alcoholism (not non-rate, just low), and remained close enough to their families of origin and extended families that there would have been shunning if someone has tried to abandon children.

So, actually, some gentile women did “set their sights” on Jewish men, but it’s more complicated than “they were evil temptresses trying to lead men away from Judaism.”

But a shiksa is not just a word for a non-Jewish woman, anymore than the c-word can be applied to every women you don’t know, or even every women you have had an unpleasant encounter with. Some rise to the “c-word” level, but most are just not that bad. There are plenty of women I’d call “bitchy,” who by no means rise to the “shiksa” level.

So how do you insult a woman who is not quite a shiksa, but still needs something? try these: “Makhasheyfe,” “Paskudnik,” or “Zhlob.” The first one is literally a witch, but is has the same connotations it does in English. The second is someone whose character is extremely faulty, odious, and everything a shiksa is, without the “unholy” implications. Also, there’s usually an implication that a shiksa has to be attractive on the outside; a paskudnik is not necessarily so. A zhlob is gauche, talks a little to loud, interrupts, or dominates the conversations, and basically screws up all the social niceties-- is either over- or underdressed, tactless, and seems to take no interest in corrective measures, nor get the hint when people try to help. In goyish circles, the zhlob just doesn’t get invited places, but in Jewish communities, we’re smaller, and everyone is related, so the zhlob is tolerated.

73

FWIW, here is the relevant Seinfeld footage.

74

Thanks for the explanation of this sense of “schikse” as some sort of non-Jewish floozy.

As for other insults, I have heard a woman refer to another woman in German as a “Fotze”. I understood this as essentially the “c-word”. Not English enough for the Scrabble people, I imagine.

75

Are they watching our games so they can delete the words we use? I’ll use what ever word I want to, freakin idiots

76

Obviously you can use whatever the fuck words you want when you’re playing casual games. But as the very first sentence of the OP says, the new rules apply to tournaments and other official competitions.

77

Sometimes when my cousins and I got bored of regular Scrabble, we’d play theme Scrabble, and sometimes the theme would be proper nouns, like “place names.” We drew slightly larger banks, like 10 tiles, for these games.

Yiddish Scrabble, with transliterated words, was always fun. We argued more about how to transliterate words, as people stuck in letters, or left them out to hit double-word scores, etc., than in actually playing the game.

78

oh…I should really read more than a few first words, my bad. I’m notorious for that but then again, I’d probably say it all again…

79

cool ideas!!

80

I never heard of Babbu as a sicilian word. BABBO in the North is used to mean Boomer, but it is not offensive at all