When deaf people play Scrabble

When you play Scrabble there is a hard and fast rule about using accepted words to the play the game. According to Scrabble's rules:

Accepted Scrabble Words

Players may place any word which can be found in a standard English language dictionary. Official Scrabble dictionaries also can be found in bookstores and online.

Types of words which cannot be used are abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes. Words that require a hyphen or an apostrophe cannot be played. Words that are spelled with a capital letter cannot be used.

Generally speaking in an English-language game of Scrabble, foreign words cannot be placed on the Scrabble board. If those words appear in a standard English dictionary, then the word is allowable. This is because the word is spoken often enough by native English-speakers that it has become a part of the English language.

On the Scrabble website there is an online Scrabble Dictionary word search. Plug in a word you think it exists (this is called "scrabblenogging") and hit the return key and see what it says. If it comes up saying that the word "does not appear in Merriam-Webster's Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary, 4th Edition" then that word is unplayable and does not count for points.

And so, that got me thinking. Suppose you have a group of people who are deaf, hard of hearing, hearing and culturally deaf people. One person puts down a long 8 lettered word "deafhood" that nets a good number of Scrabble points but the group challenges the person saying the word doesn't exist.  A quick trip to the online Scrabble Dictionary search gets this result:

If this were to be a real Scrabble tournament that word "deafhood" would not be accepted  and cannot be counted. The same thing goes for other made up words that might come to your mind. Something like the a-wordism, for example.

Scrabble rules are clear and firm. Let's not be the selfish scrabblenogger and do things "unofficially" when it doesn't count in the real game of Scrabble.

Let your standard dictionary be your friend. When in doubt, always refer to the online Scrabble Dictionary to do the search for you.

Meep! OMG! LOL! Scrabblenoggers!!! Aarrrggh, matey!

Scrabblenogging - verb, the putting together letters into a new word thinking it exists in a dictionary; the believing that a new word ought to belong into a dictionary. 

Scrabblenogger - noun, a person who tries to force or populate a new word into the general population.

You know the game, Scrabble? Putting together letters into a word and you score points along the way? And remember once in a while a player would put down a word believing it's actually a word unless challenged and the said "word" would be looked up in the dictionary? The challenged player would then be proved wrong. But sometimes a player would be insistent even adamant that the new word thinking it either makes sense and how it ought to be a dictionary or he was sure he'd seen that word somewhere and tries to force players to accept that new word.

That makes him an extreme "scrabblenogger."

Are you a scrabblenogger extremist? Or just a plain ol' scrabblenogger?

Although I may have done some scrabblenogging when I thought a word actually existed in a dictionary but it turned out not to be so. I think many of us have done that if you have ever played the game Scrabble.

Every year new words are added into the Oxford dictionary where words once obscure are now used by millions of people today. OMG! For example, LOL! and meep, are words or acronymns that were very recently added into the Oxford dictionary. Are you following me, yet?

Using Google search engine for "OMG!" turns up 173,000,000 results. "LOL!" comes up with 916,000,000 hits while "meep" gets 1,500,000 results. And, yeah, even high school kids can get into trouble in school for saying "meep" (what is the definition of "meep" anyways?).

Imagine that. 

Now, as a matter of record today, you, the readers, are now my witnesses seeing that I am the inventer of two new words, "scrabblenogging" and "scrabblenogger." Those two words do not exist in any Google search results until today. And I made sure they get added to my blogger.com dictionary database. So there! Feel free to use them as much as possible.

Now, I'm a scrabblenogger. OMG! LOL!

Meep!

So, with all the a-wordism (31,000 results) and "deafhood" (44,900 results) efforts on trying to get them forcefully recognized or else you'll be dangerously labeled with the a-wordist if they don't get tthose words into the dictionary!! I'd say good luck with that. I truly mean mean that. Work hard and get 'er done!

Did you get that message, Beth Scoggins?




I'd just say those words are meeps.

I wonder if they'll stop meeping with themselves? Are you a meeper or a scrabblenogger?

And, so with honor and gratitude I leave you with this video of this Sesame Street character, Beaker, (known for his meeping meeps) singing the song "Ode to Joy" with his meeps. His meeps started many, many moons ago and it took so long until the word "meep" finally landed in the Oxford dictionary a few weeks ago. Don't worry about the song, it's just a bunch of meeps. Just put your own words into his mouth and imagine whatever he's saying since reading his lips would be impossible.

Enjoy your evening, folks!