The game is Word Cookies by Bitmango. I contacted them but haven’t heard back. I’m guessing it was just an oversight, but it still pissed me off.
They generally just use some free dictionary and don’t censor because that would take any amount of effort.
The funny thing is they do censor. Also, the levels have a set word list that someone came up with beforehand.
Maybe the censor is recycled garbage too then. I know my word game’s dictionary is absolute trash.
I mean, it’s a word isn’t it?
The N-word is a word too. Should it be in a list of words you are supposed to figure out to pass a level in a word game?
I’m taking a turn here, off the original topic a little, but not a true subject change or tangent.
There’s a ton of history behind all the terminology around terms like this. And they’re all inherently racist. They aren’t, however slurs (currently, one could debate the past) in the few places they are used. They’re too archaic to be slurs in English, they just aren’t used.
Griffe, in specific was more of a French colonies thing, with other terms being used elsewhere.
Now, the point of all this is to get back to why the term is racist in the first place.
All the terms, mulatto, quateron (or quadroon), octoroon, metis, mamelouk, whatever; they are all about how much black is in the person, how much African heritage they have. Kinda obvious, but it’s never about how much white they have. The French colonies has specific terminology for someone that’s 1/64 black. Think about that. Out of all their ancestors, one is black, and that makes them black, with some white blood, separate from people that looked exactly the same.
That whole “one drop” mentality is why they’re all racist, horrible terminology, even though they aren’t used as insults in English. They weren’t really used as insults back in the slave era either, just as yet another way to keep the boot on necks. The terms were used among free people of color too, which shows just how effective that boot of language really was.
Now, the terminology varied a lot because it came from multiple languages. Spanish, French, Portuguese and English. Where you were determined what terms were in use, originally, but as colonies shifted hands, slavers intermingled,and borders moved, things got mixed around some. Here in the American southeast, you see even more mingling of the terms, with the dominant ones shifting over time in various locations.
But, and this is actually relevant, the U.S. isn’t the only place this kind of thinking existed, and some of the terms are slurs in other places and languages.
Griffe isn’t a slur anywhere I’m aware of, but “sambo” is, and it was another word for the same 3/4 African ancestry. Afaik, it isn’t a common slur, big there are places in South and Central America where it’s used as one.
However, there are also places in South and Central America where mulatto, or mulatta are used with pride.
Now, why am I writing this? It’s not just a historical curiosity, some vestigial words lingering in dictionaries. There was an entire set of jargon used as a tool of dominance and oppression. The thinking behind it still lingers everywhere that European imperialism existed (so, essentially everywhere across the world). Australia even had the same or similar terms for people with aboriginal ancestry.
The stain of slavery, specifically the African slave trade, is embedded across the world. We forget sometimes, because the terminology of oppression changed, that we still think that way. It takes effort for some of us to first realize that we default to thinking of anyone with mixed African heritage as black first, as the black being mixed into the other “race”. And eliminating that way of thinking is even more work.
But it’s work we need to do. As individuals, as nations, as a species, we need to understand that the systemic racism isn’t just about laws and official biases. It’s about the lingering, pernicious taint in how people think about race as a whole.
Solid write up! You’ve changed my opinion. I had thought terms like “octoroon” were merely archaic descriptors, had never thought of the “one drop” angle and what that implied.
Holy shit! There’s even a word for all this!
such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which the dominant group perceives as being subordinate
1/64th: Sang-mêlé. My god, that’s a laugh-out-loud racist word if I ever heard one. How far back did they want to go?!
For anyone else finding this interesting, this might be the opening of a rabbit hole:
Takes a bold man to play that word. Would be funny seeing people sweat to play it.
There’s letters n i g g r on the table
*looks at the letter on his hand*
E
“uhh, mmmm, I… I got nothing”
“My turn! I’ll play E. NIGG…!”
“BOBBY NO!”
Like in this classic South Park episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc39s7_Iwo8
Ginger
What did you call me?!?
Your Wordle puzzle of the day, presented by Truth Social.
You can’t fit it in Wordle with a hard R
But you CAN fit it without it
Yes, I know nobody agrees with me, but I think you should just use that word. I can’t think of any “natursl” way it could pop up in conversation, unless maybe if it’s some hiphop musical context.
If you’re trying to avoid this word like the plague, you’re just giving it more power for the racists who do use that word. If it’s just an archaic word with a weird meaning, like the word “griffe” it looses all power. The racists will probably still keep using it, but it will have as much power as “griffe” has.
I think we are somewhat on the same page here. What matters isn’t the word you use, it’s the intention behind, which is hopefully obvious from context.
When I get called a nerd, my response goes anywhere between being proud and being insulted depending on context. The word itself has no emotion by itself.
Shouldn’t it be the same with many of these words that some people consider racist?
Was the question: “Words Elon Musk uses at home”
No that’s Kaffir
I love it. But no, it was just an anagram game.
Get ready for more of this as companies start leaning more heavily on trash AI.
I very much doubt this is the result of AI, as much as somebody not checking the dictionary they imported into their game. Kinda like that Hello Kitty dictionary’s… concerning definition of “necklace”.
I’m sorry what?? Why the hell???
I posted this image from reddit
Oh no.
Had to Google that, but wtaf
Reminds me of the Buggre alle this Bible from Good Omens. Absolute favorite scene from the books and it didn’t make it into the show.
If the definition provided was:
“A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido. Yeah!”
It would at least have referenced a great song. Opportunity missed. Oh well.
-
An albino
-
A mosquito
-
My libido
(But also: a mulatto is also a type of coffee; not just slang for someone of mixed race)
- A coffee
- A person or animal lacking pigmentation
- A parasite
- My sex drive
Makes sense. As much as aqua seafoam shame does anyway.
Yeah, yeah
So many kids won’t get this reference. Makes me sad. And feel old af.
2021 was just a string of “oh, that’s 30 years old too” realizations for a metric shitton of iconic albums.
HEYYYY MACARENA
Where did the mulatto coffee get its name?
I dunno, man.
An Italian?
It means “mixed breed” in Portuguese and Spanish. You’d most often hear the word in South America, where it means some particular mixture of heritage as far as I remember.
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deleted by creator
I’m sorry, “lenchings” is not a word in this puzzle, or the dictionary. Watch this ad to gain another credit and gave another guess.
I thought it was French holy hell
It is also French, but it means claw
It’s also German but it means grips
“Mulatto” is also an Italian word, it means the same thing. As someone already said up in the thread, nobody uses it as a slur, but I didn’t know about its etymology. I still won’t judge anyone that uses it, but I can understand how someone might not feel ok with being addressed with that word
How does the game work? Did you have to give this answer, or is it like boggle where you have to construct whatever words from a set of letters?
It has a specific list of words in each level it accepts as answers and you have to get the whole list to go to the next level. Any other words are just bonuses. This was also the longest word in the level.
So like, it wasn’t just hiding in the game’s dictionary, but someone or some pre-coded algorithm selected it to feature?
Unless the game procedurally generates the words from a dictionary
I’m not much of a coder, but even if they’re doing something procedural, it can and should still have a blacklist.
If I’m writing a blacklist for slurs, I’m not thinking of archaic words like “griffe”. I’m just making sure it doesn’t use anything that would be used in a modern context.
Maybe it just shows a person and you have to spell there race
Mulatto butts!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/griffe
I’d say their definition is worse than the word itself
Love words?
You must — there are over 200,000 words in our free online dictionary, but you are looking for one that’s only in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary.
Very cool Merriam-Webster
The fucking dictionary is a subscription now?
Isn’t that just “giraffe” with a regional accent?
All I can think of is
“A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido”
Well, whatever, nevermind.
yeah.
That’s at least more cultured than my brain shouting “MULATTO BUTTS! (Mulatto butts!)” at me
Black-ass mama . . . white-ass daddy . . .
TIL 🙃
Watched that company. They make cheap ad filled copycat games. They can’t be bothered to spend one day on filtering the words from the free dictionary that they used. Same for the support email, they are too busy counting the ad money, there’s nobody reading them
I think you’re thinking of a different company. This game lets you pay a single fee (I think it was $10 but it was literally years ago) and you get to play ad-free. They still annoy you about in-game purchases of “coins” but you can just X out of those.
And to their credit, they got back to me within a few hours and said they would remove the word.
ah, good to know
