Scrabbling

This post comes with a warning – of sorts.

It contains language likely to offend some, in fact the entire post is based on one word – and it is not a good one!

I have warned you – there has been ample opportunity for you to stop reading.




My readers who know me will be aware of my love of word games and as such will possibly on occasion have played scrabble with me. I prefer to play online than real life. For one thing, the maths is done for you, for another you don’t need to worry about whether a word really exists; you just try it out, hit the “send” button and it goes – or more often it doesn’t; but the point is you can play words without really giving much thought to whether they really exist.

By far the worst thing when playing scrabble though, whether playing online or not, is when you see a rude word on your rack, because you know from that moment your game is thwarted.

Picture the scene, then, on making a move and looking at my new letters: C – bugger! A C is never good, because you just know you will be stuck with it for a while … but hold on, because I still have the K from before, so it’s not so bad after all, I mean a CK is 8 points right off the bat without even factoring in special squares and so on and there are far more CK words than with just a single C.

Also amongst my new letters was a U.

I already had an F.

Now, regardless of age or gender, there is a 14-yr old boy hidden somewhere in the back of everyone’s brain which will activate what I like to refer to as the ‘Beavis and Butthead Reflex’ but I am sure there is possibly some proper term for it.

“Hehe! I’ve got the word FUCK!”

And you stare at the letters for an age in the pretence of trying to think of any other word you could possibly play, but in actual fact all you are doing is staring at the word FUCK, thinking

“Should I?”

So you shuffle the letters around a bit; because if they are mixed up you won’t see the word and might stand a chance of creating something clean, right?

WRONG – We have all seen the French Connection logo, so we know how it works; your brain will do that really clever thing where it says: “You know what, those letters are all mixed up! Here, let me sort them for you!”

And no matter what order you have the letters in, still all you can see is FUCK





Now here is where we see the biggest difference between playing scrabble online vs the ‘real world’; because in the real world, you would never play the word FUCK, even with the U on a triple-word square butting up against an X (66 points, by the way!) but playing online somehow makes you feel that you can push the boundaries – so you place your letters – hit the ‘send’ button and await the “invalid word” message with that immature chuckle echoing in your mind. But it doesn’t come; because online scrabble has no moral code nor a sense of humour; and so it sends your word. And you are left needing to send an apology to the physicist with whom you had until this point been deep in intellectual recourse explaining why you felt the need to use the word FUCK in this particular game. He would understand, though, wouldn’t he? Surely as a scientist he’s familiar with the BBR?

It seems not.