BURLINGTON, Vt. — Illustrious community figure and progressive activist Theodore Barnard was not above using hate speech and slurs as words to win a game of Scrabble, sources confirmed.
“I assure you, these vile polysyllabic words purely exist within the context of how many letters I can put together. If anything I’m raising awareness on what NOT to say while getting triple word scores,” says Barnard. “Sure, you could make the case that I’m simply trying to win at all costs even if it means using the vulgar terminology of the very ideologies I openly detest. And yes, one could infer from my questionable in-game choices that I’m most certainly enjoying this, but all is fair in love and Scrabble, and thus I must secure my title as the supreme overlord of stacking little lettered tiles together. I simply play to have a nice time with my adversaries — I mean friends!”
Friends of Barnard have expressed concern over his predilection for vicious turns of phrase.
“At first I thought he just had a bad batch of letters and was pigeonholed to a small vocabulary of words, but when he used two blank tiles as the letter G to spell out a slur primarily used against gay men when he could have just as easily used the tiles to spell the word ‘forgets’ or something. I figured he was doing it intentionally,” clarified game night regular Nina Dozer. “Usually what happens is he answers with a word then we accuse him of inventing it. So we open our official Scrabble dictionary and by God if he isn’t right every time. Sometimes they’re even niche sixteenth-century slurs that no one has ever heard of before for things you would never think to persecute. I’m not sure why we keep inviting him.”
Barnard recently entered a national Scrabble competition where he only played bigoted curses.
“I mean he technically won but at what cost?” questioned the appalled Scrabble tournament judge Jeff Potsworth. “It was some real nasty stuff. I’m a JK Rowling and free speech defender who has never read a ‘Harry Potter’ book and even I was gasping at what this guy was doing. I was disgusted that I ultimately had to award him a prize at the end. He made me believe in cancel culture, and that it hasn’t gone far enough.”
At press time, Barnard found himself right back in hot water after he was caught trying to add vowelless slurs to the dictionary with names like “QQZX” or “LWXFYZH.”