Even if you haven't played it, you're probably at least passingly familiar with Words With Friends-- the no-copyright-infringement-intended app version of Scrabble for the iPhone. It's a great game, in which you play real people on a whenever-you-get-around-to-it basis, and the competition can get a little bit fierce. The rules, however, can get a little bit iffy.
The game apparently utilizes the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon (or ENABLE-- though really, ENABL) for its database of acceptable words, and when you try to play a word not included in the lexicon, the game will let you know with a "Bitch, please" message about your word being unacceptable.
Now, I don't know exactly who is responsible for compiling the word list in ENABL, but their vocabulary leaves something to be desired. Often, sometimes several times a game, I'll try to play a word that is totally a word, but that Words With Friends thinks is not, in fact, a word. "Aren't," for instance. Probably other contractions, as well. The internet informs me that you can't use contractions (or hyphenates, for that matter) in real Scrabble, but that's just lame. They're real words. What else? "TV." Ridiculous. It's a word. I'm watching one right now. "Exwife." I know, I know-- hyphenates, like I said, are unacceptable. "Quo," (as in, "The status is most definitely not quo,") seems to be on the blacklist. "IQ." Abbreviations, at least common ones, should count, if you ask me. "Pogo." Who didn't want a pogo stick as a child? Did the word exist then? I think it did. "Zoltar." (Okay, not allowing the name of the psychic machine from "Big" is probably legit-- but it would've gotten me an awful lot of points.)
"Zesto." It's a fast food restaurant; there's one down the street from my house, and it would have made me win the game, damn it. I realize proper nouns are verboten. Whatever; I want to play a game of Scrabble using ONLY proper nouns. That's right; I'm a rebel like that. All I'm saying is, if you're going to host an off-brand Scrabble game in the internet age, your dictionary is non-tangible. You can add new words all the time. If the Oxford English Dictionary can add "bromance," "frenemy" and "chillax," then I think Words With Friends can handle adding a few words of its own. Seriously, these things need to be taken care of. We can get pretty competitive about this. I know Michael knows what I'm talking about, because I beat him at the game pretty much every time we play. Surely he knows this affliction as well as I do.
P.S. If you just feel like finding out if a word is or isn't allowed in WWF, there's a Word Validator here. There's some weird stuff that's perfectly acceptable.
Contractions are just shortened versions of two word phrases, though.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, many abbreviations are actually multiple-word phrases. IQ, for example. Now... if they're going to disallow IQ, then they should also disallow words like SCUBA and LASER, but they probably don't.
It doesn't bother me that TV is disallowed because the word is actually television. TV is a colloquialism
All true. The point to me, particularly with abbreviations like the above, is that as the language progresses, they adapt to be more like a regular word than an abbreviation. That's how non-words get into the dictionary, anyway-- by entering the vernacular in such a pervasive way that they basically ARE words. Like bromance.
ReplyDeleteHowever, to be fair, I wouldn't care except that I really like winning at Scrabble, and Q is worth a lot of points.
if only you ever won...
ReplyDeletePretty sure I'm about to.
ReplyDeletewrong...
ReplyDeleteI was right actually, if you'll recall.
ReplyDeletei just remember the one point victory at the buzzer
ReplyDeleteLet the record reflect that my comment was left during the game prior to that skin-of-your-teeth win of yours, a game which I won. Probably by like a million points.
ReplyDelete