I’ve got a word for Scrabble champions: mathematicians

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/06/scrabble-mathematicans-te-game-language

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The world of Scrabble is AGOG (score 24 if you managed to got one of the Gs on a double-letter score and the whole word on a triple-word score; give up if you’ve used it without the multipliers). The word TE has just been added to the revised edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. For Scrabble addicts, this is the HOLY (H on a triple-letter square to score 18, of course) grail. “Being able to hook an E underneath T means that I can play far more words,” says Robin Pollock Daniel, a Canadian Scrabble expert. “I call those the amino acids of Scrabble. The more two-letter words we have, the more possibilities a word will fit.”

TE, as you will know, is a variant of TI, the seventh tone on the musical scale. It joins AA, AG, AI, AL, EL, ES, FY, KI, KO, KY, MI, MM, MU, NU, OE, PE, XI, XU, YU and ZA on the approved list, although you could go through several lifetimes and never hear this motley collection of abbreviations, archaisms and Greek and Hebrew letters in everyday speech. These may be the amino acids of the quasi-professional Scrabble player’s tragically circumscribed life, but they are not real words. Can you define a single one of them?

Daniel, the highest-rated female Scrabble player in North America (and something of a celebrity in Canada), gave the game away in an interview with the Toronto Star in 2012. “Words are involved, but to me at least it’s more about math … Simply learning words is a big key. You don’t have to know what the word means, but you do have to know that it’s an acceptable configuration.”

Scrabble is not for people who love words and language; it’s for people who like patterns. The secret is not to make an inspiring word – LAMBENT, LAGOON and LISSOM (what a waste of the S) won’t get you very far in Scrabble. Ridiculous little words used in combination on high-scoring squares will. As Daniel says, it’s a spatial game more than a semantic one, which explains why many of the world’s top players hail from Thailand. They concentrate on structures rather than meanings. Indeed, it has been argued that speaking English is a disadvantage in top-flight Scrabble, where the true champion relies on a battery of memorised pseudo-words.

In November 2011 I played the then British Scrabble champion, Wayne Kelly. He gave me two pieces of advice: treat each move as a puzzle, and learn lots of obscure two-letter words. He singled out QI (the Chinese life force), ZO (a cross between a yak and a cow) and EE (a Scots variant of eye) as especially helpful. Our game was a travesty. I made some beautiful words, including RIME and TOME on the same go; had the scoring been based on artistic impression, I would have been in with a chance. But I was overwhelmed by those killer-fillers – JO (a sweetheart), DA (a heavy Burmese knife), AX (a variant spelling of AXE) – that enabled him to make half a dozen words at the same time. I lost by almost 250 points.

Kelly admitted that sometimes he has only a hazy idea of what a word means. It probably sounds like sour grapes, but doesn’t that defeat the object of a word-based game? Shouldn’t a condition be that you have to know the definition? Better still, shouldn’t it be a word in common currency, so ruling out ZAX (a hatchet used for cutting slates), HOWF (an old Scots term for pub) and QIVIUT (an Inuit word for the wool of the musk ox)?

I’m very happy for QIVIUT to be used in the Inuit edition of Scrabble, which will probably have an abundance of Qs but where Zs really will be the black spot. Can you think of an Inuit word with a Z? And if two 19th-century Scots are playing, by all means let them bandy archaisms as they spend a night on the tiles in their local howf. But the rest of us should play with the language we actually use – and with a respected but concise standard dictionary as the arbiter when disputes arise. While we’re at it, let’s ban those wretched two-letter words. Take an AX, or even a ZAX, to them.

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn