Transcendental Scrabble - game highlights

Here are the highlights from the five Scrabble games played last
night,
Wednesday, May 28 2008, at the Dover Scrabble Club (Delaware). We
use
the American Heritage dictionary

and do not allow phony words.

Still,
we make longer words and score more points than you. Our finished
boards are works of art.

Here are the highlights from the five Scrabble games played last
night, Wednesday, May 28 2008, at the Dover Scrabble Club (Delaware).
We use the American Heritage dictionary

fine -

and do not allow phony words.

so what does this mean? Are you implying that the Heritage dictionary
does not include phony words and other dictionaries do?

or that you have a list of "phony words", in the Heritage dictionary
but explicitly excluded by your rules? Some of the words in your
list, AD AW EF ER HO, look suspect to me.

Still, we make longer words and score more points than you.
Our finished boards are works of art.

Why is this? Do you use different rules from the normal ones?

Nick
--
Nick Wedd n... at (no spam) maproom.co.uk

In American tournament
Scrabble, there are 101 two-letter words. Get a load of the
ones we reject:

AE AG AL BA BO DE ED ES ET FE HM

JO KA KI MM MO NA NE OD OE OI OM
OP OY PE QI SI UN WO XU YA ZA

Donald Sauter <donaldsau... at (no spam) gmail.com> writes

Here are the highlights from the five Scrabble games played last
night, Wednesday, May 28 2008, at the Dover Scrabble Club (Delaware).
We use the American Heritage dictionary

fine -

and do not allow phony words.

so what does this mean? Are you implying that the Heritage dictionary
does not include phony words and other dictionaries do?

In 1976 in America, the Scrabble challenge rule was changed
so that a player who challenged a valid word lost his next
turn. This turned American Scrabble into a bluff game. If I
played WOWEE against you, you would have to decide if it was
worth risking a turn to challenge it. If you decide not to
challenge it, it stays on the board. Since it is not on American
Scrabble's Official Word List, it is called a "phony". You can
see that in American Scrabble, an experienced player can get
away playing almost any pronounceable letter combination
against a player who does not study word lists. Playing
phonies is how the highest ranked American Scrabble players
maintain their rank. (If they were constrained to playing
valid words, they would lose sometimes, see?) I hope this
sounds as absurd and disgusting to a British Scrabble player
as it does to me.

or that you have a list of "phony words", in the Heritage dictionary
but explicitly excluded by your rules? Some of the words in your
list, AD AW EF ER HO, look suspect to me.

I agree with you that modern dictionaries include too much junk.
Still, by abiding by the American Heritage dictionary, our
two-letter word list has only 69 words. In American tournament
Scrabble, there are 101 two-letter words. Get a load of the
ones we reject:

AE AG AL BA BO DE ED ES ET FE HM
JO KA KI MM MO NA NE OD OE OI OM
OP OY PE QI SI UN WO XU YA ZA

Still, we make longer words and score more points than you.
Our finished boards are works of art.

Why is this? Do you use different rules from the normal ones?

"Different rules" should not come as a shock to anyone.
snip
At a quick glance, one might jump to the conclusion that I have
taken gross liberties with the sainted "Scrabble rules"
snip

In American tournament Scrabble, there are 101 two-letter
words. Get a load of the ones we reject:

AE AG AL BA BO DE ED ES ET FE HM

Hm, I guess you don't have Scottish players (AE, ET),

and never took driver's/sex/phys ed, let alone ag ed!

JO KA KI MM MO NA NE OD OE OI OM
OP OY PE QI SI UN WO XU YA ZA

Oy! No op art for you then?

And why do you allow Greek letters (MU), but not Hebrew letters
(PE)? I hope you still allow ALEPH, at least!

And not a fan of feng shui, I take it? Or do you prefer that
abomination CHI to QI?

Nathan

At a quick glance, one might jump to the conclusion that I have
taken gross liberties with the sainted "Scrabble rules"

snip

No, not at all. I just wanted to find out whether you did in fact use
different rules, and if so, how they differed. Now that I know you do,
and you have told me what they are, I believe that they are better than
the usual rules.

Here is how your original posting came across:

"We .. do not allow phony words [method unspecified]. Still,
we make longer words and score more points than you [because we are
smarter than you]."

Whereas I now realise that you meant

"We play by a different set of rules, which allows fewer obscure
words, does not allow bluffing, and makes for better games with more
long words."

and I have to agree with you.

Nick
--
Nick Wedd n... at (no spam) maproom.co.uk

Though I don't especially object to any of your specific changes,
I admit I cringed at the number of times you pointed to words (or,
in your view, non-words) as being "flagged by Microsoft Word".  I'm
sure anyone who's used MS Word any serious amount can tell stories
of perfectly legitimate words that it flagged as invalid.

It's bad enough that Microsoft gets to ignore standards in the
technical arena.  (E.g., Internet Explorer accepts various forms of
invalid HTML, and enough people figure "if it works in IE my page
must be right", so all other browsers have to accept the same invalid
input and display the same invalid (but intended-by-the-page-creator)
result.  That's a bitch to maintain because it means there's no real
standard one can turn to when building a browser; you have to reverse
engineer from what IE does.  It's even worse when IE does the wrong
thing with legal HTML and page designers think IE is right.)  Anyway,
please do not use MS Word as an authority on valid English vocabulary
or syntax.  <shudder

        -- Don.

Point well taken - thanks. Actually, when I brought MS Word into the
picture, it was not as some high-ranking "authority" on what is and
isn't a word, just a third or fourth opinion. If I say, "ZIG is
stupid!"
I'm just some guy. But if MS Word flags it - which I doubt anyone
would
claim is equivalent to declaring "This is not a word!" - presumably
it
was a decision by a team of people with some qualifications in
liguisics.

Having said that, I think that MS Word and the American Heritage
Fourth
Edition (AmH4 - my personal choice as a word authority) are in
surprisingly
good agreement.

It's not hard to think of a reason for MS Word's flag in almost
every case.

Like all conventional dictionaries, it leaves you on your own for
most OUT- words. Even the AmH4 doesn't have OUTGAZES; we go to the
Official Scrabble Dictionary for OUT- words.

SAUTE and PIU need diddles over the E and I, respectively.
HIE is Scots, not English.

ERN should be spelled ERNE.

BEAUTS and YIPE are too slangy.

HAME has become antiquated.

ZAX is so borderline that it's not in the American Heritage college
edition even though it's in their full edition.

PAVER seems like an unusual omission. MS Word and the AmH4 are in
good agreement on -ER (one that) words.

About XIS and EF, my own feeling is that spellings of letters are
third-class words, at best,

and I don't care whether any dictionary
chooses to include all, some, or none of them, including their
plurals. It looks like even the American Heritage didn't give them
full attention; the electronic version inexplicably leaves out EFS
and GAMMAS.

Having said that, I think that MS Word and the American Heritage Fourth
Edition (AmH4 - my personal choice as a word authority) are in surprisingly
good agreement.

AHD is usually good (multiple actual linguists work on it).

It's not hard to think of a reason for MS Word's flag in almost
every case.

Like all conventional dictionaries, it leaves you on your own for
most OUT- words.  Even the AmH4 doesn't have OUTGAZES; we go to the
Official Scrabble Dictionary for OUT- words.

Why not your own knowledge of English?  

If the extent of the result of
a verb can be measured and/or compared, then you can "out-verb" as
well.  For example, we can measure/compare how far someone jumps or
how fast they run, so outjump and outrun should be valid.  But you
can't usually measure how much someone has died, so you can't outdie.

(Whether a particular out+verb should be hyphenated or not is less
obvious, since hyphenation of compound words in English is largely
idiosyncratic.)

SAUTE and PIU need diddles over the E and I, respectively.
HIE is Scots, not English.

Scots English *is* English!  Do you allow CRAWFISH, CRAYFISH, and
CRAWDAD, or only the one or two that are from your (or your group's)
particular dialect(s) of English?

ERN should be spelled ERNE.

AHD gives both spellings, ERN is listed as a "variant form", the same
classification it uses for AXE, DONUT, and ANALOG.

BEAUTS and YIPE are too slangy.

Both are in AHD (modulo the predictable plural form of BEAUT).

HAME has become antiquated.

The words you like seem to have to be current enough not to be
"antiquated" (however that's measured!), but not too current, or
they're "too slangy"!

AHD doesn't label HAME antiquated, archaic, or any such thing.

ZAX is so borderline that it's not in the American Heritage college
edition even though it's in their full edition.

Why the switch from AHD to AHCD?  If you want to rely on the College
Edition for confirmation of the (lack of) wordhood of a given word,
why bother with the full AHD?

PAVER seems like an unusual omission.  MS Word and the AmH4 are in
good agreement on -ER (one that) words.

AHD has PAVER (in the entry for PAVE).

About XIS and EF, my own feeling is that spellings of letters are
third-class words, at best,

I agree with you about the spelling of English letters, since we can
just spell them with their representation in the English alphabet
(preferably in italics).  Of course, this raises the issue of their
plurals.  Would you accept FS as the plural for F?  I can certainly
talk about how many fs I see in a sentence, so there should be a way
to spell that concept, too!

Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams Collegehttp://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

The box top says to choose a dictionary; I choose the
American Heritage Fourth Edition. I use the pre-1976 box top
challenge
rule, which, by the way, is the British and international tournament
challenge rule - and is the rule by which millions of people play
Scrabble
on-line. Scrabble was designed for four players; we often play multi-
person
games. Drawing a batch of tiles for a game from a mixed set keeps
things
fresh on a game by game basis while still maintaining the same
tile distribution overall. Scrabble itself now suggests a 9-tile
variant
to open things up; I find that just one extra tile, for an 8-tile
rack,
works magnificently. Scrabble has authorized a Super Scrabble game
with three extra rows all around; I utilize the extra rows only for
extending words from the time-honored, 15x15 main board, while
disregarding
all premium spaces in the added rows. The three-letter minimum
requirement
is because we're not six-year-olds anymore. It knocks plays in the
head
that your pet goldfish could make.

Come on, let's make *words!*

Alfred Butts would be proud.

With the extra tile do you still give 50 point bonus for playing all
your tiles? Or is the bonus given for playing 7 of your tiles?

On Jun 15, 5:28 am, davidn... at (no spam) gmail.com wrote:

With the extra tile do you still give 50 point bonus forplayingall
yourtiles? Or is the bonus given forplaying7 of yourtiles?

Good question!  Thanks for paying attention!

There's a conventional 50-point bonus for the conventional
7-tile play ("bingo", or "7-tiler").

To encourage the formation of longer words, and eliminate that
"allor nothing" aspect of Scrabble in which either you have it
or you don't, meaning either a rack with killertilesor great
bingo possibilities vs. a rack which is good for nothing, there
is a 20-point bonus forplaying6tiles("baby bomb" or "6-tiler").

Of course,playingall8tilesis *much* harder thanplaying
7tiles, so there is an 80-point bonus forplaying8tiles
("big bomb", or "8-tiler").

So the bonuses are 20, 50, and 80 for 6-, 7-, and8-tile
plays, respectively.  Sound like fair rewards for the
increasing difficulty?  Try it; it feels great!

Donald Sauterhttp://www.geocities.com/donaldsauter/scrabble.htm