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Warriors Co-Owner Says Use Of Term 'Hoodish' In Team Email Was An Accident

OAKLAND (CBS SF) - Golden State Warriors co-owner Peter Guber told team employees Monday that he did not intend to include "hoodish" among the languages he's trying to learn in advance of the NBA season.

Yahoo Sports reports that Guber used the term in response to an email celebrating the growing international diversity of the NBA. He wrote back that he was "taking rosetta stone to learn Hungarian Serbian Australian swahili and hoodish This year. But it's nice," according to Yahoo.

Apparently someone who worked for the team found the term offensive. Yahoo obtained his follow up email, which included the following:

"Someone just brought to my attention that an email I responded to earlier contains the word 'hoodish,' which I don't even think Is a Word, and certainly not the one I intended to use," Guber wrote in the email. "I intended to type Yiddish. Either my mobile fone [sic] autocorrected or it was typed wrong. In any event I regret if anyone was unintendedly [sic] offended."

CBS SF tested the terms on both iPhone and Android, and "hoodish" does not appear as a word to which misspelled words could be auto-corrected.  The exception would be if someone had already typed that word and the phone recognized it.

It remains to be seen how Guber's apology is received, but it comes months after two other NBA owners were forced to sell their teams following comments about race, and weeks after the Atlanta Hawks suspended their general manager for saying that a player "has a little African in him."

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