File under “AAAQOWJIFLQWIUZZZJRHA”: Scrabble is not playing fair.
A venerable and duly venerated game is Scrabble, the crossword board game that awards you for creating big words with little-used letters inscribed on tiles that you place strategically, orthographi- cally, and carefully (those darned tiles are slippery) on a game board. If any of this is news to you, I shake my head about why you would be reading a book about language.
I love playing Scrabble, but I’ve been losing a lot lately because I’ve been adhering to the intent of the game’s name—in its historical sense, that is. Scrabble burst on the commercial scene in the 1950s, even though it was invented in 1933 and wasn’t marketed until a couple of decades later. The July 20, 1953, edition of Time, discussing the Scrabble phenomenon, wrote this: “In 1948 a social worker named James Brunot took it over and invented the name ‘scrabble’ (dictionary meaning: ‘to scrape, paw or scratch with the hands or feet’).”
Allow me to make a couple of points here (as if you had any way of stopping me other than shutting this book):
1) Inventing a word that already exists is a prodigious feat indeed.
2) Brunot would have been more credible had he spelled his name Bruneaux and signed that contract not on the dotted line but over a triple word score.
3) Most important, the 1953 dictionaries were apparently pretty limited, because today’s online edition of the Oxford
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Bill Brohaugh
English Dictionary informs me that one of the first meanings of the verb to scrabble, from the 1500s, is “To make marks at random.”
So if to scrabble is “to make marks at random,” how can my fellow Scrabble players possibly disallow such eloquent randomly marked words as AAAQOWJIFLQWIUZZZJRHA?
68. 69
It’s just not fair.