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.

  • tacosanonymous@lemm.eeEnglish
    661·
    11 days ago

    They generally just use some free dictionary and don’t censor because that would take any amount of effort.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      122·
      10 days ago

      The funny thing is they do censor. Also, the levels have a set word list that someone came up with beforehand.

      • tacosanonymous@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        10 days ago

        Maybe the censor is recycled garbage too then. I know my word game’s dictionary is absolute trash.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.itEnglish
    62·
    11 days ago

    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

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      10·
      10 days ago

      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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1610·
      10 days ago

      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?

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        433·
        10 days ago

        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.

        • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          10 days ago

          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:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadroon

        • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
          6·
          10 days ago

          You can’t fit it in Wordle with a hard R

          But you CAN fit it without it

      • Kusimulkku@lemm.eeEnglish
        141·
        10 days ago

        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

      • abbadon420@lemm.eeEnglish
        45·
        10 days ago

        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.

        • myplacedk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          9 days ago

          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?

  • reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish
    386·
    11 days ago

    Get ready for more of this as companies start leaning more heavily on trash AI.

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      10 days ago

      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

  • circledsquare@fedia.io
    19·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
      212·
      11 days ago

      Someone with mixed African and European ancestry.

      Etymologically it’s rather nasty: the word was coined in either Spanish or Portuguese as “mulato”, as a reference to mules (“mula” - horse x donkey hybrid).

      In Portuguese it seems to me that this association faded away. However, I’m going to take a guess and say that the word is probably a slur in English, so not something that you want to use for its meaning.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        11 days ago

        I’m a native pt speaker and I had never thought of the word as slur. I remember it being commonly said on TV, music, and written on newspapers without this connotation. It was certainly more common than the preferred alternative “mestiço”.

        • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
          3·
          10 days ago

          Yeah, in Portuguese it is not a big deal. (I’m also a native speaker.) Some people do complain about it, but it’s typically based on etymology, not current usage.

          Dunno how others interpret it but for me “mestiço” isn’t quite an alternative, it’s more like a hyperonym for any person with mixed heritage (not just Afro+Euro).

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        142·
        11 days ago

        It’s archaic enough that it’s probably not a slur, or at least not a particularly bad one. Archer got away with using this as his ringtone.

      • doingthestuff@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        I’ve only encountered the use of mulatto once in the wild. My girlfriend my freshman year at college had an adopted brother who was biracial. She used the word mulatto to describe him, but at the time everything she said about him seemed very loving.

      • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        44·
        11 days ago

        Specifically half African-descended and half European (white).

        As compared to Mestizo - being half white and half native American (incl. South American)

        They went to stuff like Octaroon and Quadroon, having lower percentages of African ancestry.

        It’s all super racist obviously.

    • riccardo@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      “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

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
    61·
    11 days ago

    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?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      61·
      11 days ago

      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.

      • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        11 days ago

        So like, it wasn’t just hiding in the game’s dictionary, but someone or some pre-coded algorithm selected it to feature?

          • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            10 days ago

            I’m not much of a coder, but even if they’re doing something procedural, it can and should still have a blacklist.

            • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
              3·
              10 days ago

              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.