The Nurse Trims His Beard
Political correctness, or PC as it’s widely dubbed, has filtered into most streams of life, from schools to boardrooms, from TV to PR, from art to crosswords.
ACTRESS may be a handy anagram of RECASTS, but the term is growing moribund, in league with the other trashed gender-roles like POETESS or COMEDIENNE or AVIATRIX. (Though we still seem to cling to DOMINATRIX, while a DOMINATOR sounds like a try-hard Steven Segal flick.)
For a puzzle composer (note the neutral tag), this can be a good thing. Just because TOWNSWOMAN slips from use doesn’t mean a setter can’t exhume the title from the crypt to occupy a certain tight corner, or celebrate other equivalent words (INSWINGER, BRUNSWICK, ANSWER) that cradle NSW – so long as you signal its quaintness.
Similarly, when it comes to including Charlize Theron, say, the modern clue-monger can define her far more elusively as ‘actor’ which is far less helpful in the final wash-up, and not a tad misleading given her feminine qualities.
(I’m reminded of the Susan Orlean title, a fine collection of New Yorker features called The Bullfighter Puts On Her Makeup. For all the leaps that sexual equality has made, part of the brain stem still jumps to wrong conclusions.)
I should make clear I don’t support bigotry or racial broadsides. (One Fairfax compiler was rightly chastised for treating the NSW town, COONAMBLE, as a perverse walkabout allusion.) If you want solvers to infer a Chinese jouster by CHINK IN THE ARMOUR, then you’d better take your freelance setting skills elsewhere.
Likewise in the UK, the Irish Troubles are deemed a no-go zone. Ask Hugh Stephenson. The crossword editor at The Manchester Guardian had brickbats rain upon his office for letting one clue slip through the mesh:
Are they capped in Ulster? (5) (See if you can figure out the aNSWer before my natter concludes.)
APACHE is kosher, but REDSKIN is out. LATINO expunges SPIC. BIMBO is borderline, while MOLL must be gangsterised. The territory is pretty well staked out.
Thank God, excusing the blasphemy, that Afrit’s clue from the 1950s, appearing below, won’t bob up in this millennium. The answer by the way, expects you to behead NEGRESSES to arrive at EGRESSES:
What do happen, Mose, if our gals lose deir heads? Oh, den you find de ways out! (8)
To borrow the hiphop, that’s nasssty. Yo, hows about we leave the gutter talk to Snoop y’all, and keep our crosswords mischievous but nice. Cool. Yet the more you wander PC Land, the iffier grow its boundaries.
Last year, having fun with ‘enlightened names’ such as Sun Tzu, Martin Sheen and Jim Beam, I had my knuckles birched for including Gary Glitter. Since his pedophilia rap in Vietnam the glam rocker has seemingly lost his right to exist in a puzzle – and I’m not so sure that rates a win.
I understand the icky argument. Who wants to lend oxygen to monsters, even alleged monsters? But you have to wonder about the hazy line between PC and not OK.
A few years ago I was given a rocket for HARELIP. More recently, a loud tsk-tsk resounded in the corridors for allowing ALZHEIMER to chancily intersect the Z of HAZEL, as if to cheapen the former first lady’s battle with dementia.
I’m not saying I was right to commit such grids to paper, just a trifle muddled – and not in the anagram way. Is it OK to make the mental link between WOMBAT and WOMB, or is that extending the favour? For all the homophonic fun that ANDREW PEACOCK conjures up, once you take away his first syllable, I realise the Vice Squad is poised. Nobody apparently wants to notice the bodily fluid a BAT carries in BASEMENT. Uh-huh. Try a higher level, pal.
But even then, you have to wonder where mischief ends and moral dudgeon begins. And don’t get me started on the NIGGARD embargo. Maybe that’s a rant for next time.
By the way, those capped items of Ulster are KNEES. Gotta leg it. Love to hear you PC thoughts in the crossword realm.