Whether you wear the badge with pride or you consider it an insult, "culchie" is one of over 200 words that could be soon banned from official US Scrabble competitions.
The North American Scrabble Players Association will vote this week on removing a whole host of words - including the N word - that fall under categories they've defined as “anatomical," “political," “profane," “prurient," “scatological," “slur," and “vulgar”.
"Culchie," "culchies," "culchier," and "culchiest" are all included under the national origin slurs category.
In a letter to their advisory board, NASPA's CEO John Chew detailed his reasons for seeking to ban all these words:
"I am thinking specifically of those words which are used primarily as slurs: that is, words that are used to label someone as being of less value than the speaker based on some innate trait such as gender, race or sexual orientation - not words that are used to cause offence on scatological, prurient, profane or other grounds.
"When we play a slur, we are declaring that our desire to score points in a word game is of more value to us than the slur's broader function as a way to oppress a group of people. I don't think that this is the time for us to be contributing divisively to the world's problems."
After surveying members of the Scrabble community online, Chew released a statement on 8 July, saying: "Our NASPA Advisory Board has been doing an excellent job of debating the issues, reading your responses, and reaching out to their own constituents to solicit more submissions, and they will ultimately render their verdict this week, no later than Thursday night."
Should the vote pass then the words will be banned from 1 September. The World English Language Scrabble Players Association (WESPA) is discussing whether they should follow suit, with its chairperson, Chris Lipe telling The Times "There’s vigorous debate across the Scrabble community.”
We're not sure how culchie ended up on a list in North America but whether it's actually offensive is debatable in itself. Judging by the proud response of those who got a high score in our Irish culchie quiz, many are delighted to be a culchie.
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