Lexicon Valley Tackles Scrabble

Lexicon Valley, the new Slate podcast, speaks about Scrabble and its curious relationship to the English language. Ultimately does it celebrate language or not? Should language lovers love it or hate it?

If you don't want to listen to the full half-hour-plus episode, here is my synopsis:

Host Mike Vuolo interviews Stefan Fatsis, who wrote Wordfreak. In the interview, Fatsis comments on the nature of competitive Scrabble players, confirming that they are just not the same as us everyday Scrabble lovers. The difference: the rest of us love words and try to make high scoring ones. The competitive folks, in contrast, like math and probability. They know what letters are left in the bag; they make sacrifices in some turns to work towards 7-letter words later and make moves that eliminate the risk of opening up spaces for others. They try to memorize tons of words and stems of words that can be made into words when another letter is added: "an arsenal of language." It is ultimately a "limited use of language" oriented toward a very particular purpose.

Competitive Scrabble players build all sorts of skills. Of course the main one is rearranging letters and knowing whether there is likely to be a word contained in a particular group of letters. Some players like to learn definitions, but many don't. Fatsis himself says that he finds that it is too much for him--the goal is cramming words into one's brain and pulling them out when needed.

Lots of people hate Scrabble's reliance on super-obscure words that no one ever uses. What the game does--for the die-hards, anyway--is reduce language to a series of logical problems that can be solved by finding the optimal mathematical solution. To do so requires keeping track of what's been used already and what is yet to be played, what balance of vowels and consonants remains, and what one is likely to get on the next draw of letters.

Fatsis stresses, however, that a true word-lover can love Scrabble, too: Scrabble requires that we think of language in a way that is broader than daily usage, than active vocabulary. Perhaps it is cool that there are so many words in English that don't get used everyday. On another level, players can hope for something transcendent to happen. Something beautiful like placing whole words aligned with other words, using great or interesting words, building interesting shapes. Though technically Scrabble is all about utility, there is this beauty that can break through.

The conversation goes on to consider a great controversy about the Scrabble dictionary itself: there is a different American dictionary and international dictionary.

In 1978, the official American Scrabble dictionary 1st Ed. came out, but a different dictionary, with a broader lexicon, was being used abroad. This was in part because Hasbro owned the rights in North America, but Mattel owned them elsewhere. As Scrabble playing has grown abroad--for some reason South East Asia, and Thailand in particular, has become a hotbed for the game--the North American players who don't know the international dictionary or don't always play with it have fallen behind. Now there's pressure by some for North America to adopt the international lexicon, but others push back. Some say that it is flawed or too permissive, with too much archaism and an excess of words from Scottish and Welsh and even Maori. The controversy boils down to this: what is English? How broad is it? Does it include its full history and its full global spread? On the other hand, does an even further expanded lexicon make the game too easy? This was a critique when QI and ZA were added to the American Scrabble dictionary--now it is much less likely for one to be stuck with one of these two high-point letters. On the other hand, there have been some artificial limitations. Hasbro has also excised "offensive" terms from the dictionary, words including "jew," "jesuit," "fart," and "kike." After some protest, however, they now continue to allow those words in competition, on the basis of supplementary lists that include no definitions. For competitive players, after all, definitions are irrelevant: it's all about math and letter combinations.