Apparently, the lunacy of political correctness knows no bounds. It has no common sense and is always on the prowl for something new to be...
Apparently, the lunacy of political correctness knows no bounds. It has no common sense and is always on the prowl for something new to be offended over.
The latest nonsensical PC controversy is over a crossword puzzle answer in The New York Times, a news outlet that stands out for its liberal bias even in the liberally biased mainstream media. When it comes to virtue-signalling, the left will eat its own.
The hubbub is over the answer to a clue from The Times crossword puzzle on Tuesday that read, “pitch to the head, informally.” New York Times Crossword Answers reveals that the solution for that clue is the word “beaner.”
It might have seemed innocuous enough to anyone doing the puzzle (The Free Dictionarydefines the word as a baseball term, referring to when “a baseball is deliberately thrown at a batter’s head”). However, in some circles, the term “beaner” is a slur for Mexicans.
Even though The Times puzzle was completely innocent in context, Will Shortz, The Times’ crossword puzzle editor, was issuing a New Year’s Day apology for anyone who might have been offended. (The “Joel” Shortz cites is apparently his assistant, digital puzzles editor Joel Fagliano.)
In the apology, Shortz gave other examples of words that hold more than one meaning, including a slur. Those words have also been used in the publication’s crossword puzzles.
“My feeling, rightly or wrongly, is that any benign meaning of a word is fair game for a crossword puzzle,” Shortz wrote.
But now that policy will be reassessed “if enough solvers are bothered” by words that can be slurs are being used in their correct definition for the puzzles.
Shortz also wrote that his viewpoint was expressed “with a pure heart,” but according to Fox News, the apology was not good enough for some critics.
One Twitter user of Hispanic heritage was quick to point out the problem with all of the outrage.
That user was not alone in defending the use of the word in the puzzle — and attacking its attackers.
In this day and age of knee-jerk corporate reactions to manufactured leftist outrage, the crossword-puzzle writing team may find themselves lucky to keep their jobs.
It seems once you outrage the snowflakes, simply being attacked on social media is not nearly a high enough price to pay for their choice to be offended.
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