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Word Games
October 26, 2009
I'm a mad Scrabble player, or at least a player who's mad about Scrabble! And on
my travels (I'm writing this to you from Krabi in Thailand) I've had the opportunity
to play a lot.
Almost every game makes me realise how educational the game is, as well as being
heaps of fun. For example, I recently challenged a word that my opponent put down
and, after discovering that it in fact wasn't a proper word, we found stacks of
new words we had never heard of by looking up the dictionary and browsing around
where the offending word would have been!
It's probably not ethical and certainly wouldn't be tolerated in the official World
Scrabble Championships, which always come up with words you just can't believe exist.
For example, in the 2005 titles the words 'euripi', 'ane' 'qant' and 'tana' were
used. You're a better wordsmith than I if you knew what any of those meant before
you looked them up.
I wrote in an earlier blog about the changing face of journalism during the technological
revolution and it's patently clear for me to see here. Walking down the busy main
road I came across a newsagents and was surprised to see only one English newspaper
on the rack outside the shop.
Compare that to 25 years ago when I was travelling the world and there used to be
just about every one of them available, although they were usually two or three
days old by then. Now, of course, you can call them all up via their websites, which
in fact I did today when I wanted to check a sports news story.
Going back to the Scrabble, it's not the only game that's useful in expanding your
vocabulary horizons; crosswords and word puzzles in the papers every day are also
fantastic ways of getting an edge when it comes to word power. As I've written before,
you can learn something about the English language every day if you put your mind
to it. You can do that by playing Scrabble, and enjoy the satisfaction of beating
your opponent at the same time!
Happy writing!
Gary Smith
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