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SpellBinding is a word-finding game in which you find as many American English words as possible with the provided seven letters.
gemini://tilde.cafe/~spellbinding/game/cgi?
Since its inception, there's been a question of which words should be excluded, because they are offensive. This can get out of hand - someone out there is offended by the same words that seem completely innocuous to an unsuspecting, well-meaning person.
On the other hand, _not including_ words is perhaps equally offensive. These words exist, ugly or not, and who am I to decide that no one is allowed to acknowledge their existance...
After much deliberation I decided to not edit words based on their offensiveness. These words exist, and pretending they don't may make some people happy, but there is a price. Editing our history to eliminate unsightly periods can only lead to the eventual disaster of repeating these horrible mistakes. It's better to own our terribleness in the past and do the best we can in the future. That requires honesty.
In fact, one of the reasons for building this game, for me, was the ability to _not edit_ reality, after being enraged that a mainstream version had omitted words like SNIGGER or NIGGLING because some uneducated fool may be offended.
I do apologize to anyone who is genuinly hurt by disembodied words - it is not my intention to hurt anyone's feelings.
A player recently wanted to know why the word GYPSY is included, and that is should be removed as a demonym, a word used to denote a person who inhabits or is native to a particular place.
Aside from the obvious capitalization rule, demonyms are excluded largely to eliminate thousands of localized words, as every named place has people of that place as well, and there are many, many little places on our planet. That's a whole other game.
Gypsy, when capitalized, is generally an offensive word used to refer to the Romani people, and is not included. However, when lowercased to 'gypsy' it is a rather offensive word, meaning 'to travel' or 'to roam', apparently while 'gypping', or cheating people. Yeah, I know. Included.
Many offensive racial slurs are capitalized, and therefore not included. But often they enter our lexicon as generic terms and shed their capitalization - and wind up in the dictionary.
Many such words do refer to people of a particular place, but usually the place itself is not the issue anyway. Consider 'spic' - which may refer to the Spanish background - it can't be localized considering the spread of the Spanish Empire - a significant portion of the human race is Spanish-speaking. Or 'dago' which _also_ includes those of Italian descent.
Let's all work on making a world in which these words are a distant memory of our embarassing, but not forgotten, past.
Thank you for playing SpellBinding.