still a Scrabble champion! but not gloating
Facebook! Who knew?!? I thought it was just some timewasting MySpace for grownups. It turns out you can play Scrabble on there!
Scrabble is one of the things I miss most in my current life. You need a partner, or someone with some time, or someone who isn't emailing you to arrange a drink next Tuesday week, to play Scrabble. You need sad, nerdy kids, not cool ones with too much music for their iPods and multiple MySpaces.
I was taught by the best, in possibly the best circumstances. My uncle, Tom Vink-Lainas, is, or used to be, a near-championship-level Scrabble player. He and my aunt Mary, to whom I am also very close, spent several of my most formative years living in an old frame house in the Catskill mountains with no electricity or running water, and three little kids. I used to go and stay a lot. I'd babysit my cousins, pump water from the well, tend to the enormous aluminium pot of hot water on the stove, make the bread (it was two miles to the shop: you try doing the uphill return journey with two kids under five!) and, in the evenings, play endless Scrabble on the living room table by the light of a kerosene lamp. Mary played too. I think I only saw her beat Tom once. My then boyfriend, the now ex-ex Mr B, also played, and I can't recall if he ever beat Tom. I stretched and stretched my limits, I spent the intervening days dreaming of seven-letter words and red squares, and I think I might have beat Tom twice.
Well, I'm happy to report that in my first (online) game of Scrabble in many years, I have beat our own fellow Hackney blogger Ben Locker, 353-309. (Remember, it was my first game for years! Watch those numbers now I'm dusting off my rapier-sharp Scrabble gloves.) A most worthy opponent he is, too.
On the other hand, if you want to know how it can really get, check out this article from Slate. Apparently, no matter even if you've just broken three world records with one game - including 365 points for one word, QUIXOTRY - if you haven't memorised the entire Scrabble dictionary with its lists of words-of-two-(three, four, etc)-letters, you're just considered to be "no good."
What I want to know is, where's the magic there? If it comes to devoting that much mental energy to it, I'd rather use my words for something a little more fulfilling. Poetry, anyone? I wonder how many points in that...
Anyway, must dash, Ben's starting a new game...
12 comments:
Ha ha. Sounds like gloating to me.... though I'd never have challenged you if I'd known you were a graduate of some sort of Scrabble boot camp.
I'm going to make my next move, then I'll re-read The Thought Gang to mop up lots of 'Z' words for future games.
Okay here's where I admit that in our one game plus two eords, Ben has scored the three highest-scoring words - the last being I think 83 points for his "baize," on both a triple letter score (guess which letter) and the fabled red square... after that he just had to "take the baby for a walk" - or, as I'd put it, "run and hide."
ummm. It's not possible to score a triple letter score and a triple word score on one word, at least not on a regulation Scrabble board. Those two premium squares never appear on the same line. Perhaps the Z was on a double letter score?
Mmm pace Michael Cresta, I don't think 'Quixotry' is a word. That is because there is already a noun - Quixote. I fully accept Quixotic as an adjective, accordingly, but then to turn that adjective back into a noun ... sorry, but that's rather like the naughty habit of a certain large country of turning nouns into verbs (my favourite is 'burglarize'!). Indeed some have it that any noun can be verbed. In the words of the Major, "no, I won't have that!".
Incidentally are there any other fictional characters whose names have given us two quite different words? In real life maybe Nelson - Nelsonian ignorance, Nelson (meaning 111 in cricket etc), Nelson (full and half) the wrestling holds etc but that's not the same as Quixotic and Donkey, is it?
Ahhhh, no, no, no, P-Ump, Quixote may be a noun but it is based on the name and applies to the person. Quixotry would apply to a tendency, and I think you of all people can see the usefulness of it. I'm very glad I've seen it. Once I get back to work I'll be waiting for an opportunity in some long, boring meeting, where someone is indulging in a little too much blue-sky thinking workloads are trebling instantaneously, to say "well that's all very well - but I've had enough of this pointless Quixotry!"
As to the verbifying and all the rest, I think you'll find we have Jimmy Joyous to thank for a lot of that stuff. The Irish & the Americans have a lot more in common in that way than anybody has with the English.
Donkey?
I can think of fictional characters whose names are bywords for types of behaviour - Micawber, Gradgrind - and Catch-22 which is of course not a person -
Does this mean that Don Quixote really is the greatest fictional character of all time? Kundera's been trying to tell us that, or something like it, for decades.
'Donkey' derives from Don Quixote, indeed. Prior to the book's popularity, said beasts were only referred to as asses.
I will ask our resident word guru on the acceptability of Quixotry. I'm not denying its potential usefulness, but that's not enough to render it legitimate. My favourite literature-derived adjective is brobdingnagian. I can't see how you could get away with saying 'brobdingnagry' to mean large things, though, could you?
In the meantime, might I just express a personal feeling here, which is that I’m glad we can have this discussion in a cordial manner. Scrabble was an unmitigated disaster in the Umpire’s household, mostly thanks to sister-Ump and Father-Ump I would cowardly assert. We had our holidays in close quarters in the 70s and 80s, in remote parts of New Zealand where it would sometimes rain. When it did, out would come the board games. Chinese chequers ok - if enough played so the jealousy would be spread evenly. Chess - not too bad as long as the older members didn’t humiliate the younger ones. Scrabble – hopeless. It would only be minutes into the game before F-Ump would play a word from Do-Re-Me (can't remember which it was, think it was La). Not a word, S-Ump would sternly insist. F-Ump’s answer was that it is in a song, from The Sound of Music. This would enrage S-Ump (feisty when young, worse when a teen). Though she didn’t think of it, I wonder what F-Ump’s reaction would have been had she come back with ‘Ramalamadingdong’ or any weirdo hippy songs or poem words (Jaberwocky might be a fertile ground) for that matter. Still, the real fault there lies with Rogers and Hammerstein. It is a very lazy line "a note to follow so" - come on, couldn't they have worked in the French meaning or something?
Anyway the result was that Mother Ump tried insisting we played without scoring, but even that wouldn’t work. So it was the same pattern – scrabble board withdrawn, brought back five years later and then hidden again within a day or two. Happy days. We all still get on. And still don't play scrabble, ever.
*Wince* *Grovel* word-guru sides with you (eventually; this may be only because I argued your point of view more strongly and eloquently than my own). But then she's Irish ...
Oh I didnt realise you could play Scrabble on Facebook. Never been too hot at scrabble though, that and the conundrum on countdown
P-Ump, is that really true about donkey? That's so sweet...!
And I love your family Scrabble account, it is very vivid and real. I feel as if I'd been there. Your sister sounds colourful, and I have two words for you: Scrabble Dictionary.
Thank you for arguing my side so effectively: I've always said you were a gentleman.
James, yes you can, but it lacks an IM function for whingeing about what letters you get. I checked out your blog and have linked it: fun! Fellow EDW bloggers & all.
You can IM if you like, Katy, if you click on the image of the envelope next to the Scrabble board refresh button. I just completed my first game against an old friend from sixth form, and won 331-263. It's excellent fun. I think the highest scoring word was my SQUAD on a triple word score, the S forming SO with AGIO for 77. Appropriately and wittily enough, my friend's last word was GIT.
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