What to do about rude words in Scrabble

‘Nice,’ my junior school teacher once surprised the class by announcing, ‘isn’t nice.’ We shouldn’t, Miss Morris went on to explain, describe food as ‘nice’ but instead as ‘tasty’, ‘delicious’ or perhaps ‘tempting’. Similarly, rather than saying that a person is ‘nice’ we should indicate in what way they are nice, describing them for example as ‘charming’, ‘generous’, ‘thoughtful’ or ‘drop dead gorgeous’.

Well, she didn’t say that last one. In fact, she rather had it in for the word ‘gorgeous’. The nine-year-old me was much miffed when she crossed it out in one of my earliest literary efforts, explaining that it was ‘slightly vulgar’. That still smarts – and after I’d gone through all the trouble of spelling it correctly, too.

So I can sympathise with the dilemma of Scrabble players who spot that the word which will score them the most points is also a word that in polite society is considered slightly vulgar – or even downright offensive.