Ntuple Indemnity

This is going to sound like an excessively vitriolic pants-in-a-twist rants-in-a-twist from some pretentious chap who thinks he’s the only student on this campus qualified to write about Scrabble. But guess what, Chloé Fedio: I am the only student on this campus qualified to write about Scrabble. And I can say from my position of authority, your article sucks. The facts are wrong, the premises are false, the logic is absent and the conclusions are trash.

Since I am an occasional (if dormant) volunteer on the decks of the leaky deathship, I can’t submit this to Letters, so it’s going here instead.

Ms. Fedio’s fundamental misunderstanding (not just about the storied crossword game, but dictionaries, and the English language in general) is in her assertion that the dictionary, and the expansions thereof, are too permissive. They are not. Because they are standardized rulebooks, and restrict the lexicon to a finite functional vocabulary as a subset of an infinite language, Scrabble dictionaries are inherently prescriptivist. In other words, they are overly restrictive, and that has always been the leading motivation for the adoption of expanded dictionaries, be it the OSPD4/OWL2 in North America and Israel or SOWPODS everywhere else. Is this a problem? Yes, if you want to correlate Scrabble-English with practical, meaningful English. But the discrepancy is in the other direction.

Officially-sanctioned Scrabble dictionaries do not apply to living-room players who would rather pander down to some lowest common denominator of words found in “everyday life”. If you’re going to play like that, there’s absolutely no point to playing by the book. The book is there for people who place an importance on consensual, unambiguous adjudication. It is irrelevant to everybody else, and all parties involved in its creation realized that. I’ve spoken to some of them, and I know.

The spurious claim that “the Scrabble dictionary is unique in its acknowledgement of words that most people wouldn’t even consider to be words” is simply bunk. The word list is a proper subset of the union of its authoritative sources. There isn’t a single word in the Scrabble dictionary that you can’t find in the most recent edition of a “real” dictionary (if not several of them), and I’m not talking about your fifth-grade pocket reference abridgment of Webster’s. Validation by existing dictionaries and the lexicographers that worked on them is a necessary precondition for inclusion.

Ms. Fedio asserts that “these additions aren’t contributing to the betterment of the game, or adding to the advantage of skilled players.” Wrong, wrong, wrong. Only two posts ago I posited that the dictionary update will have a long-term impact on encouraging risk-taking in the absence of perfect word knowledge. It’s beneficial to all players because they all have equal access to the same augmented arsenal. While specific changes do negate some of the defensive aspects of strategy, the revision is a boon to everything else. There’s no upset balance between word knowledge and strategy, because word knowledge permits strategy. You can’t make parallel plays until you know the twos. You can’t identify a good leave on your rack until you know what kind of high-probability bingos are available. You can’t play unless you are willing to learn, and the first thing you learn is humility in the face of the language.

This sort of “you’re not allowed to know what I don’t know” all amounts to rank anti-intellectualism at its most insidious. It’s not up to some backseat driver with a tragically limited vocabulary to define what makes something a “fake word”. A phony is anything that is not in the accepted edition of the tournament dictionary. That’s the only rule that matters. And you’re not obligated to obey the rule – unless, of course, you want to play with the big boys. The adoption of the OWL2 only affects the club and tournament players, who have already accepted (to paraphrase Edsger Dijkstra) that Scrabble is no more about words than astronomy is about telescopes. The philosophy of the official dictionary – inclusive, but never inclusive enough – has been in place for decades.

Learn how to play the goddamned game and then we’ll talk.

Now, I’m rather busy for the rest of this semester and I don’t have much time to blog, so will Gateway writers please stop baiting me? I appreciate that we’re getting away from the sophomoric ego-stroking of narcissistic sub-apprentice wordsmiths entranced by the sight of their own headboxes who have nothing better to say apart from stomping about in colloquial slop in thick and muddy boots of hyperbolic profanity, but could the ones that have taken the baby step of selecting coherent subject matter do some elementary research before jumping to vacuous conclusions? Or is that too much to ask?

The new Scrabble dictionary, the OWL2, is the official book for all tournaments effective tomorrow. Although I had a chance to flip through the OSPD4 (the book with the red cover you see in stores which also claims to be official) back in June, and my copy’s been collecting dust on the shelf ever since, I only just sat down to go through the complete list of additions.

I’ve only played a handful of games under the new book, so I can’t comment on the new dynamics afforded by QI and ZA and the whole slew of S-hooks you can slap on two-letter words (AGS, AHS, BES, EDS, GOS, HOS), but on the whole, I love the new words. I love how they encourage riskier play.

See, a good Scrabble vocabulary was never only about knowing the words in the dictionary. One also had to learn the negation: you had to remember which commonsensical words you knew were words could not be played. This still holds true, but the problem is now substantially alleviated.

The number of new words that I once played (and had challenged off) is really quite unbelievable. Before I learned all my threes, I was certain that I could play the likes of APP, CIG, DUH, EEK, FAB, MIC, POO and VID – all invalid in OWL/OSPD3, all good in OWL2. And that’s just the threes – never mind the fours (DINO, GOTH, MEDS, TECH) and the bingos (FAGGIEST, TAGLINE, UNLIKED, and yes, BINGOES).

My favourite? PLUNKY. In one of my very first games against Jason Guillery, I played it on a triple in the corner and made him sweat. He stared at it for five, maybe ten minutes trying to decide whether or not to challenge it off, whilst hovering kibitzers checked their dictionaries and looked at us with the smuggest of visages. In the end, he let it stay on the board.

I rebounded to a win and caught him with only a second left on the clock. I’m not sure if he ever got over letting it go. It was an eminently memorable match; this was over four years ago, and I still remember it among hundreds of forgotten games. Since then, I think I’ve only beaten him once.

The new list doesn’t demand a lot of learning – just a lot of “not unlearning”. And this applies not only to the perpetually neologic techies (ANTISPAM, BITMAP, TERAFLOP) and gastronomes (AHI, UDON, CHAI), but ordinary people who read the daily news (BURQA, HIJAB, HEGEMON). Canadians rejoice: LOONIE is now good without the S, and TOONIE is in the mix. (Remarkably, so is TWOONIE, though I know not a soul who spells it that way. Is it identically pronounced?)

I think newcomers are going to have a substantially easier time adjusting – until the next revision a decade down the road, of course, when the lexicon will no doubt look decrepit again and former grungy teenagers will complain about the omission of EMO*. (And may it never be legitimized.) People who are new to competitive Scrabble will always exclaim, “That’s not a word” – but that’s the nature of the game: if you don’t know the word, it’s your fault. But they shouldn’t have to say, “But I know that’s a word” – or worse, trap themselves in self-doubt and fail to muster up the courage to make the best move. And now, we should have less of that.

We might have quite a bit more of the “That’s not a word” sort of indignation, though, because of all the genericized brand names that have now joined the likes of XEROX, among them JELLO, KLEENEX, LEVIS, POPSICLE, PYREX, TEFLON and VELCRO.

As a parting treat, here are some of the new words you will never see in a televised championship final: BOINK, BOODY, BULLDYKE, FUBAR, GAZOO and WAZOO, JOHNSON and WILLIE, NOOKIE, STIFFIE, and WANK (with a whole set of familiar inflections like WANKING and WANKERS).

Remember what I wrote in The Gateway a few weeks back? The experts agree. I’ve been validated.

Let’s go over few news items that have been simmering since Friday. So it looks like the stars decided it would be a good idea to stay in alignment, and presto – Toy Story 3 is out the window. Does anyone still have doubts about the Pixar buyout? I didn’t think so. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

In the isolated world of obscure comic book anthologies based on Pulitzer-winning novels, Dark Horse has cancelled The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. This is a landmark in that I now unexpectedly own every first-printing issue of a comic book series. It’s also too bad, because in the last few issues, the series was just beginning to show some of its true potential.

I haven’t mentioned how a little over a week ago, I saw the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra perform a night of sacred music with pianist Kevin Cole and Vancouver-based singer Denzal Sinclaire. By “sacred”, I mean George and Ira Gershwin, and I mean it in earnest. There’s not much to say about it aside from the fact that it was an exhilirating night with the American canon thanks to interpreters who are best described with the word clarity.

Listening to Mr. Cole dance on the keys is a lighthearted reminder that speed isn’t created by cranking up the metronome: it’s an illusion generated by what you play, and the cleanliness with which you play it. Budding pianists would do well to remember this, especially when it comes to ragtime. It’s all about control with the illusion of freedom. That’s magic, isn’t it?

As for Mr. Sinclaire, who has seen a lot of airplay on CBC for as long as I’ve listened to jazz, I’m enjoying his latest album, My One and Only Love. (The title track has been moving up and down the stuck-in-my-head playlist since the opening credits of Leaving Las Vegas.) It’s heavy on ballads of mellow disposition, but listening to him run the gamut from Hoagy Carmichael to Stevie Wonder makes it easy to place the disc in a grand tradition of song displaced by half a century. In person, Denzal was a littler guy than I expected, but mass-over-density has minimal bearing on presence when it comes to voice.

Speaking of jazz, I’ve always been a little baffled at the lack of dynamism in how jazz is filmed. I harbour a deep admiration for music videos on a purely technical level, as a person who takes pleasure in watching moving pictures for that elusive logistical how’d-they-do-that. I can’t stand to watch a lot of them, though, because generally, the music sucks. Were it not for A Hard Day’s Night and Fantasia, I’d almost posit a systematic inverse proportionality between the quality of music and the quality of a film constructed upon it. And there’s a gulf of difference between Walt Disney’s dream of the “concert film” and the modern music video, even though they share a common heritage.

There are some great videos that aren’t just a mask for a lack of musicality – consider Stars in “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead”, an ostensible tribute to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (and a pretty good song). But not in jazz. Recent years have seen Diane Reeves’ contextual insertion into Good Night, and Good Luck and Diana Krall’s Chrysler commercials, but that’s a very specific type of jazz, the mellow strain.

So it’s with reinvigorated joy that I present this Wynton Marsalis iPod advertisement. This is probably the best visual representation of the bebop aesthetic’s latent dynamism that I’ve seen since Michal Levy’s animation of Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Pity it’s so darn short.

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

The National Scrabble Championship is no more. Starting with this year’s event in Phoenix, Arizona, its moniker is now the U.S. Scrabble Open, or maybe the Scrabble U.S. Open (they’re not wholly consistent). It makes a lot of sense, since for years, Williams and Edley have responded to questions about why Americans don’t have an invitation-only regional championship like us Canucks with the vision statement, “It’s like the U.S. Open.” Unfortunately, I don’t think the T-shirts will make for great conversation pieces like the ones with alluring words like “national” and “championship” written on them.

The official transition to the Second Edition of the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OWL2) isn’t until March, but this weekend I played the last-ever Calgary tournament with the old book, so for all intents and purposes I’m finished with l’ancien régime. It’s going to be an interesting change of pace to throw defensive strategy out the window now that Q and Z are a palpable threat, which leaves C and V as the only foolproof blocking tiles, but also means that I won’t have to fret so much about botching an endgame on account of drawing an unexchangeable Q. Bring on the QI and MBAQANGA!

Speaking of the Q, I’ve always wanted to play ENQUIrES on a double with the Q on a TLS for 122 points, and this weekend, I did. That made for a good $10 in addition to the $50 in third-place lunch money I earned with my 9-5 record.

Not so hot was when I tried to play APHORIsT on a triple in another game, which in my excitement I placed as APHROIsT*, losing both my turn and my spot. I think it’s the Scrabble nerd’s equivalent of shopping at FCUK.

Collegiate debating superguru Colm Flynn has been using the World Debating News blog to post live updates from Dublin Worlds. Seven Canadian pairs broke to octo-finals (all from the Central region), among them Carleton rookie Garnett Genuis, who spent the past three years stomping all over the Edmonton high school circuit on my watch.

Winners: Mike Kotrly and Jo Nairn. That’s two victories in a row for Canada, and a vicarious one for the West, with Mikey being an expatriate and all. Was I betting on them all along? Yes. Is it still a thrill to be acquainted with orators of this calibre? Yes. The highest congratulations are due, and I know they’ll receive it by one channel or another since I know Mikey has made fun of this blog in a round of debate on at least one well-earned occasion.

I wasn’t there, but I expect reports from readers like you and you and you.

And now, back to reading cross-tables.com. It has everything short of individual game scores, which are never officially reported for ratings calculations anyway. Avert your eyes from my five-year performance graph, or at least ignore the discouraging lack of a net rating gain in the past two years. And then there’s the mountain of statistics from the records of the Calgary club, but it’s missing everything from late 2003 to the relaunch of the website in October 2005. Did I really lose a game with a score of 506-190 back in September 2001? Yikes.

Thoughts and ideas have outpaced my WPM to the point where, were it not for my philosophical affinity for the primacy of written communication in an educated society, I might as well carry a tape recorder everywhere I go, start up one of those newfangled “podcasts” and be done with the whole shebang.

I never got around to writing about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rent or Good Night, and Good Luck, all of which have given me so much to say that I can’t possibly hope to make the time to do them justice. And that’s not even considering the hours whiled away playing Mario Kart DS online, possibly the worst thing to happen to my precious piano fingers since cramps-in-a-jar, but one that offers the new-to-the-franchise pleasure of – how do the juvenile delinquents put it nowadays – pwning some n00bs.

More on all of this later, I’ll bet. Don’t bet against me. I’ll lose.

Other than that, two quick observations come to the fore.

If Scrabble be the game of kings, then it is a contest as marked by coups and regicides as a song about Oliver Cromwell set to a Chopin polonaise. On Saturday, when Calgary held their annual one-day, twelve-round Marathon tournament, I won $10 for losing with a score of 422. (The score was tied, but she played ID for 5 and bled a 20 off my Q for 447. I think the new dictionary will have something to say about that come March.)

I emphatically did not win $10 for earlier losing with a score of exactly half that in my worst game in years, and probably the lowest-scoring game in the entire 28-player event. I can’t speak for the goings-on in the bottom division, but even they usually have little trouble clambering over 300 – it’s the upper stratosphere that eludes them. As one of the Division 3 players remarked with pitying incredulity: “211? That’s all you got?”

Loath as I am to blame the tiles, when all you draw are a J, a W and a whole lot of dreck worth 3 points or less that never congeals into a bingo thanks to a sustained assault on the part of the letter I, you can’t do a damnable thing.

I landed another $10 for playing 16 bingos – low for twelve rounds. The Bingo Ace prizewinner, at this level of play, usually approaches an average of two a round – maybe more. It tells you that everybody was shutting the board down with a good deal more vigour than necessary.

All of that was my first observation. My second one is briefer still: I can’t understand all the talk – or “dithering”, as it were – about Canadians not wanting a Christmas election. This is an early present, as far as I’m concerned. It won’t be the single most exciting thing this Christmas, but between a Mel Brooks musical, a Spielberg assassin drama and the lifelong dream project of Wellington Santa Claus himself, comparisons are hardly fair. Speaking as someone who has no taste for partisan politics and would be happy to do without it, this is still going to be the most interesting (and more importantly, entertaining) event in Canadian politics since probably the Quebec referendum: fun to watch, fun to read about, and fun to remember. I can hardly wait to see Calgary blanketed in red, green and Tory blue. It’s going to be one hell of a palette.

A ceasefire between Christmas and the New Year? Ludicrous! If rabid shoppers are going to be lining up in droves for marginal Boxing Day discounts, that’s as good a time as any to lug the war machines of party propaganda out into the open. There’s no time like a holiday for people to sit back and actually think, or better yet, joke about the issues.

The emergency mobilization of every faction in the country is, true to our climes, just so cool. It’s like all the fanfare and glory of little Johnny going to war, without any of the death, dismemberment or yucky psychological damage – a civil war of words, to wit. Taste it. Savour it. Indulge in it to excess. Then meet the sweetness of victory or bitterness of defeat, and taste it all over again.

Excelsior!