Going back to the 1970s I recall Jewish leaders/advocates saying there's nothing wrong with 'Jew' as a noun, and they would rather be identified as 'a Jew' than 'a Jewish person' . (Nobody really wanted to support 'Jewess' though I think there were those who did say they accepted it, out of consistently.) As a verb, 'I jewed him down' (bargained intensely) was then and remains now quite offensive.
Once I personally was told "You're no Jew" as an intended compliment or expression of thanks for something generous the speaker thought I had done for him. He immediately apologized and said that was just the way everyone around him talked growing up, and he didn't intend the implicit insulting view. I believed him, mostly, but it was a little awkward.
I remember having a conversation in college in the 1990s. I did not know a lot of jewish people growing up. My roommate did and had many Jewish friends. According to him, to refer to someone as “a jew” instead of “jewish” in contemporary conversation was highly offensive (the former sounds contemptuous), but not offensive in older historical writing, for e.g. in a biography about to Anne Frank. I am not sure “jew” without the indefinite article or the plural “jews” would be considered as offensive, but such is the complexity of language and semantics.
I agree with Ira Glass. My guess is either, a) people confuse Jew as noun with Jew as attributive noun, which does sound ignorant (eg, 'Jew doctor'), or b) people have the intuition that they should soften the word from Jew to Jewish in case someone incorrectly (or correctly) perceives prejudice.
I'm a big fan of the Unorthodox podcast, and one of the hosts, Mark Oppenheimer, keeps trying to make "Jewess" happen. I'm not buying it. Jew it's not an offensive term, unless you have hate in your heart, which is not something I think you should assume about Scrabble players. But the game does need to be flexible, because terms evolve from an offensive to offensive, and vice versa.
In this podcast, you make a kind of statement, the construction of which has always been a pet peeve of mine and since you are a linguist, I wonder if there's more to it than I had previously thought. You said that "all words are not allowed" in Scrabble. To me, that sounds like you're making a universal statement about "all words", meaning that there are no words which are allowed in Scrabble, which is obviously not true. I would think that you meant to say "Not all words are allowed" which indicates that there are a certain subset of words not allowed. I find people making this mistake in sentence construction all the time and it irritates me, but again, it seems like something you would know something about.
In more seriousness, in studies in formal syntax and semantics (that's under the umbrella of Linguistics) there is something called "scope", coming from logic. Certain elements -- such as quantifiers ("all" in the example) and negation ("not" in the example -- apply to other parts of a sentence or logical formula. In the logical formalism, which is how the analysis of the meaning is being expressed, if there is more than one element with a scope for what it controls / applies to , the scopes must be nested, one entirely inside the other, not overlapping.
With two elements that have scope, there are two ways of putting them in inside/outside order, and those correspond to the two meanings you note.
1) [all word [ not [ word is allowed ]]] == "all words are disallowed, every word is forbidden"
vs
2) [not [ all word [ word is allowed ]]] == "not every word is allowed - some words are forbidden"
So, what determines which of those meanings will be carried by a particular English sentence?
Very often it is easiest when the actual word order in English matches the order of the scoped elements in the logical representation. That is the principle you were using when you suggested "All words are not allowed" is 'supposed' to mean (1) above.
But many studies -- both "armchair analysis" and actual experiments with subjects and statistics and all that -- suggest that when contrary-order interpretation gives better plausibility or makes more sense, that is what people will go with. Thus the Shakespeare and the McWhorter examples.
My Vietnamese wife is HIGHLY offended that you repeatedly used the phrase "slippery slope"... Hehehe. Just kidding, she's an adult, and is affected not at all by sounds people make with their mouths, nor words that she must be "forced to stare at" on the page or on a Scrabble board.
When a couple of words that begin with "f" were deleted from the Official Scrabble Dictionary (v. 5, perhaps), I just decided that, in my house, v.4 would be the "house" version and the people I play with accept that.
To my knowledge it has never been permissible to play "JEW" in Scrabble because of the rule prohibiting proper nouns. (I lost a game about a decade ago over this word.)
OK, I googled it a bit and I stand corrected. Apparently "JEW" was included not as a noun but as a verb in the OSPD editions 1 and 2. It was removed with the publication of the third edition in 1996.
Going back to the 1970s I recall Jewish leaders/advocates saying there's nothing wrong with 'Jew' as a noun, and they would rather be identified as 'a Jew' than 'a Jewish person' . (Nobody really wanted to support 'Jewess' though I think there were those who did say they accepted it, out of consistently.) As a verb, 'I jewed him down' (bargained intensely) was then and remains now quite offensive.
Once I personally was told "You're no Jew" as an intended compliment or expression of thanks for something generous the speaker thought I had done for him. He immediately apologized and said that was just the way everyone around him talked growing up, and he didn't intend the implicit insulting view. I believed him, mostly, but it was a little awkward.
I remember having a conversation in college in the 1990s. I did not know a lot of jewish people growing up. My roommate did and had many Jewish friends. According to him, to refer to someone as “a jew” instead of “jewish” in contemporary conversation was highly offensive (the former sounds contemptuous), but not offensive in older historical writing, for e.g. in a biography about to Anne Frank. I am not sure “jew” without the indefinite article or the plural “jews” would be considered as offensive, but such is the complexity of language and semantics.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/637/transcript
I agree with Ira Glass. My guess is either, a) people confuse Jew as noun with Jew as attributive noun, which does sound ignorant (eg, 'Jew doctor'), or b) people have the intuition that they should soften the word from Jew to Jewish in case someone incorrectly (or correctly) perceives prejudice.
Excuse my capitalization errors. Meant to write Jew and Jewish.
I'm a big fan of the Unorthodox podcast, and one of the hosts, Mark Oppenheimer, keeps trying to make "Jewess" happen. I'm not buying it. Jew it's not an offensive term, unless you have hate in your heart, which is not something I think you should assume about Scrabble players. But the game does need to be flexible, because terms evolve from an offensive to offensive, and vice versa.
In this podcast, you make a kind of statement, the construction of which has always been a pet peeve of mine and since you are a linguist, I wonder if there's more to it than I had previously thought. You said that "all words are not allowed" in Scrabble. To me, that sounds like you're making a universal statement about "all words", meaning that there are no words which are allowed in Scrabble, which is obviously not true. I would think that you meant to say "Not all words are allowed" which indicates that there are a certain subset of words not allowed. I find people making this mistake in sentence construction all the time and it irritates me, but again, it seems like something you would know something about.
Have I been wrong this whole time?
And let me remind you that all that glisters is not gold.
Do glisters blister?
In more seriousness, in studies in formal syntax and semantics (that's under the umbrella of Linguistics) there is something called "scope", coming from logic. Certain elements -- such as quantifiers ("all" in the example) and negation ("not" in the example -- apply to other parts of a sentence or logical formula. In the logical formalism, which is how the analysis of the meaning is being expressed, if there is more than one element with a scope for what it controls / applies to , the scopes must be nested, one entirely inside the other, not overlapping.
With two elements that have scope, there are two ways of putting them in inside/outside order, and those correspond to the two meanings you note.
1) [all word [ not [ word is allowed ]]] == "all words are disallowed, every word is forbidden"
vs
2) [not [ all word [ word is allowed ]]] == "not every word is allowed - some words are forbidden"
So, what determines which of those meanings will be carried by a particular English sentence?
Very often it is easiest when the actual word order in English matches the order of the scoped elements in the logical representation. That is the principle you were using when you suggested "All words are not allowed" is 'supposed' to mean (1) above.
But many studies -- both "armchair analysis" and actual experiments with subjects and statistics and all that -- suggest that when contrary-order interpretation gives better plausibility or makes more sense, that is what people will go with. Thus the Shakespeare and the McWhorter examples.
Always thought it strange “nazi” is playable especially in light of “jew” not being playable. Maybe it’s part of never forgetting.
My Vietnamese wife is HIGHLY offended that you repeatedly used the phrase "slippery slope"... Hehehe. Just kidding, she's an adult, and is affected not at all by sounds people make with their mouths, nor words that she must be "forced to stare at" on the page or on a Scrabble board.
So 'tar baby' is a tar baby.
When a couple of words that begin with "f" were deleted from the Official Scrabble Dictionary (v. 5, perhaps), I just decided that, in my house, v.4 would be the "house" version and the people I play with accept that.
I enjoyed this episode and the discussion.
Scrabble has always been one of our favorite family games. I wrote about this here:
https://bruck.translation.org.il/the-games-we-play-with-words/
To my knowledge it has never been permissible to play "JEW" in Scrabble because of the rule prohibiting proper nouns. (I lost a game about a decade ago over this word.)
OK, I googled it a bit and I stand corrected. Apparently "JEW" was included not as a noun but as a verb in the OSPD editions 1 and 2. It was removed with the publication of the third edition in 1996.
Of course it's the verb that is problematic!
See https://scrabble.wonderhowto.com/news/controversy-changed-scrabble-0114722/