Scrabble words: Nuts and Bolts

 Most of us who play Scrabble use a dog-eared old dictionary to settle disputes about the validity of words like zydeco or qui, but for the people who play in serious tournaments there's an official list of allowable words.

It's a long long list, but the most skillful players will know all the possible three-letter words, at least, off by heart (even if they don't know their meanings. But then, if you think about it, you don't have to know the meanings of the words to play Scrabble).

Anyway, this list has just got shorter by about four hundred words, and the problem here isn't the three-letter words, but the four-letter ones. I don't know exactly how many words have been lost because Mattel, the owners of the rights to Scrabble in most of the world (though not North America) isn't providing a list. Research suggests, however, that many of the banned words are unflattering ones to do with racial attributes. Ray Adler, who's in charge of this stuff, says he wants to make Scrabble 'more culturally relevant'.

Relevant...interesting use of that word...

Three matters arising from this decision: does pretending that nasty words don't exist make the feelings behind those words disappear, or does it encourage the nastiness to thrive unchallenged?

Some words get ruder as time goes on, while others become polite. If you ban a rude word that describes a feature displayed by a group of people, have you lost a means to express your admiration for that feature?

And is there anything more likely to encourage the use of a word than banning it?

Double points for any rude word, anyone? 

Or how about half points?

Hmm...but you'd need an official list for those, too, wouldn't you, or there'd be quarrels about what's rude enough to count!

Words To Consider Today: high-scoring ones at Scrabble. In theory, the highest possible scoring word is oxyphenbutazone. That's a phenylbutazone derivative, C19H20N2O3, and a kind of medicine. First used in 1959.

Zydeco is a type of Cajun music and qui, a legal term, is Latin for who or which.