Life Attention Scrabble Nerds
The New Yorker’s fascinating and provocative article on Wikipedia led me to the site’s phenomenally detailed page on Scrabble, “a popular word board game in which 2-4 players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a 15×15 game board.” On this page we find: Scrabble history (original name: “Criss-Crosswords”; original manufacturer: Alfred Mosher Butts); various rules for challenges (although unsuccessful challengers forfeit their turn in the US, the British, Irish and Australians follow a much looser standard, “in which no penalty whatsoever is applied to a player who unsuccessfully challenges”); and acceptable words, a topic of much hot contention among Scrabble-playing Stranger writers. (Some of us insist that obscure two-letter words such as ae, ch, ug and xu are legitimate because they appear in the Scrabble Dictionary; others maintain that the fairest form of play is one in which players use only words whose meanings they actually know. There’s also information on the highest-ever US game (770); references in literature, TV and film; and incredibly obscure strategies and tactics, including a bizarrely complicated mnemonic device known as anamonics. Have fun!
Bouncin' tiles is where it's at. I remember me and the homies used to just sit on the stoop all day in the summer, sippin' 40s and politickin' over that shit.