“Want to play Scrabble?” my housemate asked yesterday, out of the blue. “Sure,” I replied, although I remembered with some reservations a previous game we had played, where she had declared some of my two letter words unacceptable. House rules die hard, and hers included something vague about only including “real words”, or “words you know the meaning of”. “And none of those spelled-out letters, like EN and EM.”

Two things you need for a satisfying Scrabble game, in my opinion, are 1) a Scrabble dictionary, and 2) an agreement to accept any word in the Scrabble dictionary, and only words in the Scrabble dictionary. A regular dictionary will not do. It contains too many abbreviations, proper nouns and borrowings. My house rules amount to no house rules. But then I did often play with my grandfather who is a crossword master, and you certainly need to be able to appreciate obscure words “for their own sake” to get across crosswords.

While I was sitting on my AD, knowing it to be a perfectly valid Scrabble word, I tried to figure out why this house rule annoyed me so. I mean sure, the first time you get an AE played against you for some phenomenal score, it is an outrageous affront to ordinary words. But the answer is to learn them yourself, not ban them, in my view. And the thing about the Scrabble dictionaries is, at least they’re well-defined. At least you are always playing to a common, fixed set of words. Once I’ve learned that these little words exist, I can’t unlearn them, even if I’ll likely never use them in speech. What annoyed me was the suggestion that “ordinary words” might easily identifiable or obvious. What even constitutes a word is not a well-defined thing, especially when you get down to these little scraps of letters.

And that’s my vaguely linguistic rant for the day :)