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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’ll have to look for The Right Word.
“The Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson is good. English and how it got that way.
In reference to the Mother Tongue, about how abitrary things can be, on another thread there was a brief mention of the word “kludge”. Now you would think that this would be pronounced to rhyme with budge, cudgel, drudge, fudge, etc, but no! It rhymes with luge.
My daughter is actually making scrabble tile coasters to help fund her trip to the national TSA competition. She made a set for her grandmother for Christmas and has 4 orders just from Nana’s friends. Now to teach her about buying her own supplies so the whole thing isn’t profit.
Jo is not English but Scottish, meaning sweetheart.
I bought my daughter and son-in-law a magnetic game which hangs on the wall. There are hooks to hang the strip with their “tiles” (magnets) facing the wall and a dry erase scoreboard. They pretty much always have a game going, although it’s more like a low tech “Words With Friends” and not a replacement for a sit down at the table game of Scrabble. It’s pretty neat, though.
That may have been one I was involved in. Two alternative spellings of Kludge are Kluge and WordPress.
I have a magnetic Scrabble car game. It can fit in the palm of a hand, provided the hand belongs to a professional basketball player, perhaps six inches per side. The tiles are maybe 1/4″ squares. Not the easiest to play with.
This is also a good book.
Seawriter is ready for you on that one, I’m sure.
An “internet” (lower case) is any network running the internet protocols. The “Internet” (capitalized) is the aggregation of all the internets (lower case) connected together.
… but the blank tiles giveth life.
John, far be it from me to ever argue with you, however alas, I simply cannot abide by this. For despite the propensity of the English language to take on a “Big Tent” platform, I cannot think of anyone who would ever take the time to construct something a ludicrous as this:
No, I simply cannot abide. As the close-minded conservative that I am, I must stand, indeed, if I must I will stand alone athwart the history of the English language, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
You may all vilify me as you see fit. Here I stand! :-)
Count me in on Jim’s side of this war.
My aunt and uncle were surprisingly, frighteningly competitive Scrabble players. A few decades of evening board games in place of television will sharpen anyone’s skills. Since they both easily beat all comers, they were really only competition for each other. Then my uncle had the idea of sneaking a dictionary into his briefcase for the long bus ride to his government job. He memorized every two and three letter word and began to win regularly- until his studying was discovered. Somehow reading the dictionary was cheating, but doing the New York Times crossword puzzle every day was just something normal intelligent people did. Eventually equilibrium was restored and they went back to beating everyone else all of the time and each other roughly half of the time.
lol, wait until you hear me start talking about competitive scrabble! My old roommate and I kept the OSPD in the bathroom so we could study it when otherwise occupied.
Interestingly, some of the best scrabble players in the world are from Thailand and don’t speak English. They just memorize all the letter combinations.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2004/word_up/you_dont_have_to_know_english_to_play_scrabble.html
My mother-in-law and I used to have quite a competition. My wife is the cooperative type who only wanted to find ways to build out the board so it would be easier for others to make plays. (Don’t mess with her on dominoes, though!)
I am standing up and applauding you sir!! When I first started playing these games on my phone and getting demolished by folks using these types of words I stopped playing. You are absolutely correct about them. How in all that is holy is “oe” a bloody word? Someone please use that in a sentence without looking up its “meaning” first. I would love to sit at your table for a real game of words, not this drivel we have been subjected to today.
That would be a good house rule, ackshully. Rather than depending solely on the dictionary, one should also make the player use the word correctly in a sentence.
This way the player is actually expanding their functional vocabulary rather than just memorizing word spellings for their game value. Bring back a bit of the educational element of the game.
I had the exact same thought. You just beat me to it. Although it does slow down the game. Maybe use it as part of a challenge.
When I was in Junior High/High School my next door neighbor and I played a lot of chess, and we were very evenly matched.
Then I read a book on how to improve my game, and he started beating me consistently.
There was an episode of the sitcom “Family Ties” where the Dad was challenging all of the kids to play scrabble, but he was desparately cheating.
As I recall, he came up within the word “Zoquo”. When asked to define it, he said “It’s from the Greek, to bathe”.
So Alex then played “Ushnu”. His dad challenged him and he said it meant “To Towel off. After I zoquo, I like to ushnu.”
It’s weird what sticks in your head 30 years later.
lol, some kind of wind? Why is that a word? Beats me!
If we would play with a casual player we would let that person use the dictionary, word lists, etc. And if the person wanted to we would play “TOT” (tiles on table) so that everyone could see the other tiles, and experienced players would kibitz and help out less experienced players. It’s great fun!
“Quijibo: A fat, balding, North American ape with no chin.”
From the official Scrabble Game Rules: “All words labeled as a part of speech (including those listed of foreign origin, and as archaic, obsolete, colloquial, slang, etc.) are permitted with the exception of the following: words always capitalized, abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes standing alone, words requiring a hyphen or an apostrophe.”
(Emphasis added.)
Ahem.
And Words With Friends is, despite appearances, a very different game (I love them both!), so it’s not surprising that the rules are different too.