The New York Times reports on the movement to remove many types of slurs from Scrabble tournaments. Some players have objected, because many slurs are short words and therefore have a high point value:

Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, said the Scrabble players association had “agreed to remove all slurs from their word list for Scrabble tournament play, which is managed solely by NASPA and available only to members.”

Julie Duffy, a spokeswoman for Hasbro, also said the company will amend Scrabble’s official rules “to make clear that slurs are not permissible in any form of the game.”

The game that Hasbro sells in retail stores has not included slurs in its dictionary since 1994. But the players association, one of the most prominent governing bodies in competitive Scrabble, had still allowed them. The agreement could also affect what words may be played in online versions of the game.

Interestingly, the author of the article, David Waldstein, manages to write about slurs without actually citing any of them; the closest is “n-word”, which appears in a direct quote. Quite a linguistic feat!

A PDF version of the article is available here.

At its virtual WWDC keynote on June 22, Apple unveiled a ton of updates for iOS 14, watchOS, AirPods and iPads, but the company also had news to share for its laptop products. We’re not just talking about the much-anticipated adoption of Apple’s own processors for Macs, either. Today, Apple announced that the next version of its desktop software will be macOS Big Sur, and it introduces a new design and major updates to important apps.

Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo has signed an executive order announcing the state would move forward with changing its official name due to its ties to American slavery. The state’s official name, “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” appears on state documents. But the order would shorten it to just “Rhode Island”.

“The pain that this association causes to some of our residents should be of concern to all Rhode Islanders and we should do everything in our power to ensure that all communities can take pride in our state,” the governor wrote. The new name would take effect “as soon as practicable” and apply to all state government communications, including agency websites and correspondence.

At The Conversation, Trevon Logan (Hazel C. Youngberg Distinguished Professor of Economics, The Ohio State University) writes about the history of black names in the US.

Many scholars have discussed black names as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement in the 1960s – but as Logan observes, black names aren’t new:

Many scholars believe that distinctively black names emerged from the civil rights movement, perhaps attributable to the Black Power movement and the later black cultural movement of the 1990s as a way to affirm and embrace black culture. Before this time, the argument goes, blacks and whites had similar naming patterns.

Historical evidence does not support this belief.

Until a few years ago, the story of black names depended almost exclusively on data from the 1960s onward. New data, such as the digitization of census and newly available birth and death records from historical periods, allows us to analyze the history of black names in more detail.

Head on over to read the entire article to learn more about black names in the context of African American cultural history.

In the 1966 “Star Trek” episode “Miri,” the title character (right) uses “the Before Time” to describe her world before a devastating plague

In his Word on the Street column in the Wall Street Journal, linguist Ben Zimmer discusses the curious phrase “the before time”. It’s used these days to refer to everyday life before the coronavirus pandemic, but where did it come from?

Beginning in the Middle English of the late 14th century, “beforetime” or “beforetimes” could be used as an adverb meaning “in the past, formerly.” “Beforetime” shows up frequently in the King James version of the Bible. But, as with many pop culture references, the current use is probably because of Star Trek. As Zimmer says:

We likely owe the “Before Time” label to an episode of the original Star Trek series broadcast in 1966, in which the crew of the Enterprise encounter a planet populated by children who survived a man-made plague. A young girl name Miri (whose name also serves as the title of the episode) explains how the planet’s grown-ups, known as “Grups,” disappeared: “That was when they started to get sick in the Before Time. We hid, then they were gone.”

Head over the Wall Street Journal to read more! (If you don’t have a subscription, you can find a PDF of the article here.)