The author of the original piece, Deborah Ross, claims disdain for ‘non-words’ used by some Scrabble players because they’re old (archaic), not used in everyday contemporary lexicons or… she doesn’t know them or agree with their use. She also says Scrabble dictionaries are by ‘Losers’ (her use of extraneous upper case, not mine). I’m sensing a Trumpian mindset and a shit Scrabble player.
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It’s an irritation - to the point of aggravation - that the online Scrabble doesn’t allow UK English spellings - even though it professes to allow you to use a UK dictionary! Scottish words, too, are not allowed, even though they are in my Scrabble dictionary AND my Chambers Twentieth Century dictionary! (SO last century, darlings!) We haven’t played online for ages - and it’s possible these anomalies have been corrected, but I doubt it. We have a nice big Braille version from the RNIB - larger letter panels. We used to play with a blind neighbour, who has since moved away. She was pretty good, too!
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I’m an ordinary recreational occasional player married to a highly-rated Collins player, so I can easily see both sides of this. <popcorn.gif>
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Obscenities are usually low scoring, short words. They need a x10 multiplier to make them worthwhile.
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Yeah, but the point is to put down a bingo next to another word so that it forms multiple two-letter words. That’s how those words win it for you.
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Oh man, now I’m wondering if one of my siblings still has that set of antique Anagrams tiles that came from our grandparents’ house…that was a favorite part of visiting them!
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Wow, I made it to the end of the comments with no mention of Word Wars? Well, it’s my privilege to mention this terrific documentary from a while back (Netflix has it now).
If you like documentaries about weird subcultures (my jam), you’ll love Word Wars. Then queue up Darkon and Paper Or Plastic. The latter is about competitive grocery bagging. Oh yes, it’s a thing. Watch all of those, and you’re welcome.
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Our house rule for playing at my parents’ is, when a word is challenged, first look up the word in the two normal-size dictionaries they have. If it’s not found, then the person who played the word has to provide a definition, only then we look it up in the full unabridged Oxford, and it only counts if their definition is reasonably close to whatever is in the OED for that letter sequence. Because if you arrange 5 or fewer letters in a phonetically credible way for English, it’s probably in the OED as an uncommon or obsolete form of something or other.
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My strategy for “Words with Friends”. Manipulate the tiles to covert bonus squares according to English phoneme. It it’s green, and the score is decent, it’s my play.
And the Words with friends dictionary is no help either. The game will accept what the dictionary rejects.
There was a great documentary about tournament - league Scrabble players I saw a long time ago. I would reckon a guess that it was this one.
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Adding that Y for MURDERY and scoring off all your effort 
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I had saved this to share with my mother.
I have since learned she pretty much wipes the floor with her husband every game so I never bothered.
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Totally read this as The dark art of playing wordless Scrabble …
hmm… yeah that’s some pretty spooky, eldritch business you’ve got going there boingboing.
(Next thing we’ll be doing phonics lessons for crustaceans.)
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I have pretty much zero interest in scrabble, competitive or otherwise; but so long as the game essentially treats words as constraints on legal tile arrangements on a board, rather than as aspects of language, does requiring knowledge of the definition really change anything(beyond bumping the memorization ceiling a bit since you now need to memorize word/definition pairs to expand your options, rather than just words)?
Once you get beyond the fairly casual level where the overlap between words and legal scrabble tile sequences is a valuable tool for getting new players up to speed quickly(compared to an equivalent game where legal tile sequences are constructed according to other rules) and let them bumble around with some combination of luck and attempts at board control adding more memorization requirements doesn’t, to my mind, do much to address the emphasis on sheer memory.
The author does exude a certain…attitude:
The top players, you see, don’t win tournaments by being cleverer than the rest of us. They do it by memorizing a long list of non-words so they can avoid the problems ordinary players encounter.
You see, it’s not a word anyone ever uses — except when playing Scrabble. It’s a special Scrabble word. A special ‘how to get out of a really tight spot while feeling awfully superior about it’ Scrabble non-word.
No; if you want a level playing field the first thing to do is make sure you’re not playing against someone who sincerely believes that skriegh is a word just because it appears in a list some loser compiled so that losers can be winners.
I don’t mean to godwin this up; but she honestly sounds like she’s stuck in the same loop as Eco’s blackshirt, where, “by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pro-level players are both beneath the contempt(certainly not cleverer…) of us normal people, with their filthy un-words and smug, cheating, tricks; whose repugnant illegitimacy is obvious from the fact that they are specifically defined by the agreed-upon rules of a game defined by the agreed-upon rules; and dangerously overpowered opponents who one must avoid playing at all costs. Us common sense people understand that “if you want to win at Scrabble, first make sure you’re playing the right person.”.
One wonders if she gets this worked up about the fact that world-class competitors in pretty much anything, especially relatively abstract contests, are kind of an odd bunch; or whether there’s something about scrabble experts that is despicable in ways that hardcore chess players or CoD contestants are not.
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Put two boards side by side. Mix the tiles. Allow each player 10 tiles and you can start on either board. If someone successfully places a word that links the words on both boards that’s 50 bonus points.
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I think its fair, if someone really wants to use a bullshit word for high points at least give me a definition. I’m also not advocating that everyone should adopt said rule, that’s how i like to play and everyone has their own house rules.
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I have one personal rule, which I only apply to myself: if I can place a dirty word, I must. Even if it’s way less points than I could otherwise post. Even if it’s to my mother. I dread the day I have “UCNT” sitting in my tray.
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