Why I Hate Scrabble
Among my more literate (read ‘word nerd’) friends I’ve counted more Scrabble players than crossword solvers at every level of ability, from casual fans to true obsessives.
This is both wrong and bad. Scrabble demeans English, and should be abolished. Until we get the Constitution amended to that effect, we should at least shun Scrabble as a way to pass the time.
Scrabble is not a game about words. It’s a game about acceptable strings of letters. If your idea of fun is sitting around memorizing long lists of kosher two- and three-letter words, Scrabble is for you.
As you do this, you’ll quickly learn that aa, ae, ai, al, and ay are all OK to use (and those are just in the two-letter ays). But you won’t learn what these ‘words’ mean, and you won’t ever have to. Words have meanings, acceptable Scrabble strings don’t. You’ll never be challenged to define your entry while playing ‘official’ Scrabble.
Words also have etymologies, synonyms, uses and misuses — in short, they have stories. Scrabble only has letters in the right order. The game rewards some level of strategic boardplay, and the ability to come up with anagrams and memorize looong lists of words. What a charmless set of skills.
To shut this open-and-shut case against Scrabble’s connection to our language and culture, I point out that many of the world’s top players are Thai who do not speak English. I congratulate them (using Google Translate), and thank them for proving my points.
So put away your Scrabble board and pick up the Times crossword. You’ll find yourself immersed in a world of meanings, ideas, facts, puns, similarities and differences, history, and all the other things that go along with words. You’ll never look back.
(And no, this post has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a pretty lousy Scrabble player)
