this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Mildly Interesting
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Shouldn't the official word list just be the dictionary? Isn't that the point?
Something about it just seems to miss the point of the game. You would think their dictionary would be cut down to include commonly known words mixed in with some eccentric ones. If anything, to prevent a situation like this where tournament players are just memorizing gobbledygook for points. Seems like it muttles the fun.
The only good way to play scrabble is by adding the rule that you must play the funniest word you can make.
I have had the most fun when i used to play with categories for double points. Having to explain why such and such belongs is half the fun.
I saw a YouTube video once where they could only use dirty/rude words. https://youtu.be/_PRlIZCI6uE?si=2ZnK2wfc7Vzz4rHb
Makes the game painfully difficult and required lots of passing. Still more exciting than legit scrabble, though. I hate the game and even more so because I was forced to play it by family (for whom scrabble is apparently the most fun board game they know) far more times than I'd like.
Ah, see, my family, now...
They'd refuse to let you play a word, on the grounds that you could surely get a better one, here give me your letters a minute.
Or they wouldn't let you play a word because it didn't 'open up the board', whatever the fuck that means.
I rapidly learned to not play with them.
You can't have an arbitrary list of words that count, precisely because most people won't memorise the dictionary. They'll just play words they know exist. And if a dispute arises they'll likely consult a proper dictionary because who has the Scrabble dictionary to hand?
Its primary purpose is to list all the permissible two letter words because that's where the desperation and disputes arise.
Can't most of the squabbles be squashed in the modern era with a smartphone? Before, your aunt would always play JO insisting it was a word, but you know thats bs. So you search it and find Jo is actually a word used in Scotland. On a second note, I am futher into a discussion about scrabble than I ever thought would be interesting lol
Which dictionary? Merriam Webster added almost 700 "words" this year, including shit like: TTYL, finsta, bussin, cromulent, doggo, simp, goated, and more. I feel like they are slowly becoming urbandictionary.com.
I mean, their job is to provide definitions for the words people use in language, not to gatekeep what words are "good enough" to be defined.
I hear each of the words you've listed all the time, they're part of our language whether we like it or not.
My point was more about which dictionary do you use and less about the exact words added. Webster added them, but Oxford and American Heritage didn't.
Use all of em and if it appears in any it's a word
Now I want to play a game of scrabble where you play a complete nonsense word, and your points are the number of Google results for that word - lowest points wins. And maybe you have 5 letters instead of 7.
I would rather be able to spell out bussin' for points than zzzz, aaa, or Mieropoix. At least it is a word people actually use in conversation.
Mirepoix is an ordinary word in cooking, but it’s an uncountable noun and they’re inventing a fake plural, like “featherses”.
Didnt it specifically say horsefeatherses in one of those comments? I start drawing the line there.
I have never heard or seen mieropoix before.
Cromulent is a perfectly cromulent word.
Modern dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. They don't tell you how things should be spelled, or what meaning they should have. Instead, they report how things are spelled and what people think they mean in the real world.
I knew Meriiam Webster was going to shit when they added "literally" as "figuratively" because people use it facetiously.
That's the point of it, though. People use "literally" as "figuratively, and it should be recorded as such. It doesn't matter that it's facetious or ironic, it's still used that way commonly.