MAKING STUFF UP
I don't dare play my wife in Boggle anymore. Mostly because I suck and she's the Boggle Queen. Something about her mental configuration lets her pluck disjointed geometric anagrams off those dice like a robin feasting at a worm farm.
I'm just not wired that way. To me, words are what they mean. They are the concept they represent. Doing well at Boggle requires you to think of words as a collection of letters with absolutely no regard to definition. I just can't make the switch.
Scrabble's even worse. Besides the fact that I can't anagram to save my life, now there's STRATEGY involved. Hitting the double letter score while not leaving your opponent any chance at the coveted triple word score.
UGH! Make brain hurt!
But I guess some people are good at Scrabble. Like Newman of Newmanisms. He likes to brag about how he'll "own you" if you're unlucky enough to be sitting across the board from him (via COTV #56). In my case, he's probably right. Especially because I don't like to toss out words unless I'm POSITIVE that they're acceptable. Any doubts, and I'll got to my backup plan ("look, I made "at". There's 2 points. IN YOUR FACE!). I definitely wouldn't experiment with iffy words like JAZZED.
I'm just grateful that "dictionary rules" don't apply to blogging. I'd be ejected from the game on damn near every post. Hell, my tag-line even uses the phrase, "off-the-wallery". Thanks to having watched all 7 seasons of Buffy, I now make up more words, more often, than Shakespeare on crystal meth.
The trick to doing it properly is knowing your context and your audience. Newman's roommate was actually wrong about the definition of jazzed. It means being excited or enthusiastic. But technically, it is still slang, and thus unscrabbleable.
Newman's definition of "dictionaried" isn't quite tenable either. It's silly to describe it as "wearing a dictionary on your head", since no one ever does that. Well, except Newman, but he's still an ok guy.
I can, however, imagine a legitimate, if slangy, use for "dictionaried". Objectivists (and sometimes conservatives, too) win arguments by being able to define their terms and use words with precision. Socialists lose arguments when they lose the opportunity to use words as floating, generalized abstractions that mean whatever is convenient at the time. So let's say an Objectivist, like Don, is arguing with a Socialist, like Howard Dean. Dean blathers some tripe, and Don challenges him to define his terms. Dean splutters, mumbles, gives up, and then, in a fit of frustration, challenges Don to define his terms. Don does so with laser accuracy, and gives Dean a thorough intellectual ClueBatting.
When asked later about how the discussion went, it would be perfectly sensible for Don to say something like. "The moron asked me to define my terms, so I dictionaried his ass until he ran out of the room, crying."
Not that this helps me play Scrabble any better. Which brings me to my point:
Don't play my wife in Scrabble. She'll dictionary your ass.
posted by Harvey at 4:45:43 PM permalink HOME
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