Scrabbled

I always thought my vocab­u­lary was pretty decent; I score well on those Reader’s Digest word tests, and I know how to spell more words than a lot of peo­ple I know. But I find myself totally out­gunned by the Scrab­ble game I recently bought for my MacBook.

Did you know “qi” was a word? In an Eng­lish dic­tio­nary, I mean? Turns out (accord­ing to the Scrab­ble dic­tio­nary) it’s the orig­i­nal spelling of “chi” as in energy, also in “tai chi.” Nice for my score, because the let­ter q car­ries a lot of points. Okay, I can see that one. But “hae”??? As in the “Scots wha’ hae wi’ Wal­lace bled…?” You’ve got to be kid­ding. I thought Scrab­ble had to be cur­rent Eng­lish usage, which is “have.” Guess not. And don’t get me started on abbre­vi­a­tions. “Ed” for edu­ca­tion is now con­sid­ered a word in its own right? Wow.

I’ve decided that instead of “Scrab­ble” this game should be called “Extreme Word Trivia.” I’m wimp­ing out and let­ting the com­puter give me “best plays” on half my moves just so I can score more points. The side (ques­tion­able) ben­e­fit, of course, is that I am learn­ing a mul­ti­tude of obscure words I’ll never use. If I came up with a sen­tence with some of these, not a soul for miles around would have any clue what I was say­ing. Ah well, it’s expand­ing my mind!