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.