Scrabble Invented! History of Scrabble
Wednesday January 19, 2011
Jan. 19th is considered by some to be the anniversary of Scrabble's debut. Here's a brief history of the world's second most popular word game (crossword puzzles being number one).
According to The Sunday Telegraph:
British players of the lexicographical board game are caught up in an unseemly row over whether to allow words used in mobile telephone text messages. Modernizers claim that shortened text phrases such as ttfn (ta ta for now), cuthen (see you, then), and fwiw (for what it's worth), should be included in Official Scrabble Words. They think that this would encourage young people to play.
Traditionalists, however, are furious with the suggestion. They claim that to allow a mixture of distorted English and abbreviations would bring Britain's favourite board game into disrepute. What's your take?
Poll: Should words used in mobile telephone text messaging or chatspeak be allowed in Scrabble? IMHO
Comments
Surely these are abbreviations or acronyms, not words, so if Scrabble doesn’t allow these usually then they can’t be allowed. Of course, you can play with unofficial rules, like Superhero Scrabble in the movie Snowcake. (”Dazilous” is now part of the words we play with!)
Acronyms could lead to a whole new way of playing scrabble. Unfortunately, a lot of them are small 3 or 4 letters so you wouldn’t get as many points. A themed scrabble of acronyms and Webwords might be fun. A new and challenging word puzzle is at my website if you want to try it. http://www.mysterymatrixes.com
I don’t think that acronyms should be allowed in scrabble. It wouldn’t be as chaleging as it is.
Inclusion of words in official Scrabble lists tends to be based upon a combination of 1) the degree of current use and 2) the duration of use. Thus, you will find many obscure Scrabble words that are nonetheless included because they are venerable (for example, THYSELF), and also a number of recent words that have gained broad usage, often because they describe something that never existed before (like BLOG). Uniqueness also plays a role; if there is only one word to describe something, like, for example, ADRENALECTOMY, then it may very well deserve a place in the Scrabble lexicon.
Should acronyms like FWIW be admitted as official Scrabble words? If they find their way into common usage beyond the artificial constraints of text message limits on length, then I would say yes. We already have a number of examples of acronyms such as FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition) finding their way into the official lists.
The Dictionary Committee of the North American Scrabble Players Association currently makes the weighty decisions regarding what words should be included in future revisions of the official Scrabble lists. Before visiting there, you may want to check if the word you want is already in one of the lists.
carl
just to reply to a couple of your points.
FWIW should never be included because it is not a word.
it is never spoken only written. we don’t say eff double yew eye double yew.
secondly, we do say ‘FUBAR’ so i think it could be a valid scrabble entry.
And i prefer FUBAR as F****ed Up Beyond All Repair.
Requiring that a word be speakable may be a bit old school with so many people texting rather than talking these days. Is there an acronym that means Computers-For-Brains? And, if so, could you pronounce it? As humans evolve (into cyborgs), so must our language!
We both seem to find the Anglo-Saxon expansion of FUBAR unspeakable for an entirely different reason, and so we have the acronym as euphemism phenomenon. But why should we require an acronym to be speakable if the words that it represents are not?
Interestingly, FUBAR is included in TWL, but it is *not* included in the (cleaned up for kids) Scrabble list OSPD4 (see the same Lexifind site to confirm this).
So apparently the NASPA dictionary committee agrees with you, rather than with me, on the expansion of that acronym. But even though they consider it to be unspeakable, they nonetheless allow (in TWL) that it *is* a word. Can you say QED?
Mobile phone talk and chatspeak shouldn’t be be included , because it’s just not a word. Maybe more young people would play, but the game it self would lost the attraction, because it wouldn’t be hard to use all tails. No fun if there is no challenge.