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Scrabble Skirmish: Them’s Fightin’ Words
Language is a peculiar thing. Growing up, we often heard the admonition, “we will speak the King’s English in this house.” Which of course as a young lad, never made much sense to me, given that there was a queen ruling Great Britain, and we were Americans anyway. But I digress.
Nowhere was this more important than in the violent sorties over our treasured Scrabble board. Slang, or “street” vernacular was not allowed. Put a word down, and it better be in the American Heritage dictionary, or in the Oxford if we happened to have one handy. You play the best words you can, the cheap ones only as a pitiful, desperate last resort. If that means you have letter tiles at the end of the game you cannot play, so be it. Suck it up and count the points, boy.
But now we have the Internet, and digital versions of the game on our Facebook, our smart phones, tablets, and wherever else they may be found. Now we have a certified Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, which includes what I purport to be absolutely bogus, false, fraudulent, spurious “words” simply designed to allow a player to dump all his tiles. People who play this way may think they look “smart” using these so-called words, but to me it suggests precisely the opposite.
I don’t care what the masses say. You will never convince me that “jo,” “oe,” “ai,” “qi,” “za,” “da,” “gi,” “po,” and “te” are valid English words. I don’t care what the “official” Scrabble dictionary says.
Take it or leave it, at my table, those are the rules. Now pass the pretzels.
Published in General
I see a couple of Japanese words in there, but no English ones at all.
I believe the king being referred to is James I, rather than any currently reigning monarch, since the King James Bible is widely credited (along with the works of William Shakespeare) as the first major work to standardize English spelling and grammar in any meaningful sense.
Do you accept spelling of foreign letter names, such as “pi” and “aleph”?
How do you feel about what the full version of the OED says?
According to the OED rules, as long as a word have been used in print by two independent sources (i.e. source #2 cannot simply be referring to source #1), it counts as a “real” word.
I’m still waiting for someone to independently use the word “misthiocracy” in print, so I can send the clippings to the OED and be immortalized as a wordsmith for all time.
Agreed, Jim. Modern word games accept so many non-vernacular words… and yet simultaneously manage to reject some very plain and common words.
Like what? Well, that’s the other problem. How is it that after so many years of word games that they still lack a common dictionary or two? Why does every word game employ a different list of acceptable words?
The board game variety will always be superior for this reason. And that’s coming from someone who generally prefers video games even to books and movies.
In thinking about what to comment, I googled pictures of ‘Scrabble board’ and found that the one I recognized as having always and forever played on is referred to as a ‘vintage’ Scrabble board.
I’m with you, Jim, and the other smart alecs can get off my lawn while they’re at it.
Well, “pi” was always accepted, because of the high regard for mathematics we had in our house.
Other words, including those that may arguably be described as non-English, but were nevertheless in common use, were often those around which our battles were staged. For example, in a somewhat older edition of Webster’s here at the office, “aleph” is not found. So in this case, we wouldn’t have allowed it.
That said, ground rules are always established at the start of the game, so you would have the opportunity to make your case for exceptions.
I suppose in my original post, I should have specified a copy of the Concise OED. (Who carries around 10-plus volumes outside your local library?)
And herein I reveal my bias. I disagree wholeheartedly with those OED rules. Especially if there are no established criteria on what qualifies as an authoritative print “source.” How many typos would become “real words”?
Furthermore, the advent of digital dictionaries seem to have rapidly expanded the inclusion of these “new words”. No, I am, and shall always be, biased to editions of the late 20th century, with some notable exceptions (for example, I allow that the internet is now a thing, therefore “internet” is a valid word). I’m not that unreasonable.
My beef is with cheap words that are nothing but tile dumpers. “Za”, they tell me, is an acceptable form of the word “pizza”. Horse puckey.
I’ve had two in my lifetime. The first was an old, flat, creased board where the paper sheen was starting to tear off. The second was a “deluxe” that had the plastic cover, with indents to lock the tiles in place, and the whole thing spun like a Lazy Susan.
Wood tiles or plastic?
Both sets had wood tiles. The older one was sort of plain wood-colored. The deluxe had kind of a cherry-stain color.
I’ve got the deluxe version myself and it is a bit easier to play. Never seen a plastic tiled version, but they did briefly have a Scrabble variant in the 80s called “Quink”, which was short for “Quick as a Wink”. That had plastic tiles. Not a fun game, it was sort of (if I remember correctly, which is doubtful in this case) a sort of mix of Scrabble, Boggle, and Battleship. We could never figure out the rules and ditched the set.
If you’re playing with people of honor, you can vote on whether or not an obscure word is acceptable. Being in a dictionary is too low a standard.
The spirit of the law vs the letter of the law. ;)
I don’t know, Aaron. When it comes to Scrabble, I find myself trending toward strict constructionism.
So, do you demand that all words must come Old/Middle English, or do you allow words from the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare as well like a bloody anarchist?
;-)
I had an elderly aunt (R.I.P. Aunt Betty) who would consistently beat me because she had all the 2 letter words and a big pile of 3 letter words memorized. I would challenge and of course the word would be in the official scrabble dictionary she had. At a certain point she would put out a 2 letter word and being gun shy I wouldn’t challenge. The it would turn out the word was fake.
I’m not sure I approve of Scrabble in general after that abuse.
“Internet” should not be a valid word, because it is a proper noun. Only a language anarchist would write “Internet” without a capital “I”.
Of course, Mattel changed the rules in 2010 to allow proper nouns.
I’m surrounded by anarchists!
Indeed. The Rule of Law is nowhere respected, not even on the game boards.
Who issued the Executive Order allowing for proper nouns? I choose to ignore that “new rule” as unconstitutional.
On a completely separate subject, anybody know what the new fashions are at the re-education camps these days?
Blue giraffe print PJs?
Scrabble is a spawn of the horned one, who looks like Cagney at times.
Everyone must remember “The Letters Killeth”.
Doh! Should have anticipated that one.
Rethinking it, I think we need a re-education camp fashion thread.
Mmm…the horned ones. Steaks and gyros.
On the OED has anyone else ever read the book linked below? It was pretty entertaining.
Yes. Oh, you mean the book about how it was created. Yes, I read that, too.
Oops. The book I linked to. Dang sentences. Thanks.
The phrase “bogart the za” appeared in NR a few years ago–WFB was still alive when it happened, IIRC. So I’d allow it. Would you allow bogart in this sense? Or the similar use of jones as a verb for crave?
The book mentioned is excellent, as is winchester’s The Right Word.