Scrappy Scrabblers

Melissa Schorr

Tuesday, Dec. 2, 1997 | 9:48 a.m.

In the end, will Scrabble players save the English language?

While the rest of us nudge William Safire towards an early grave with our grunts and "uh-huhs" and "likes" and "you knows," only the Scrabble player is providing a function for words such as "Gentoo" and "guiline," preserving them from oblivion like an environmentalist protects an endangered species from extinction.

Only the Scrabble player has memorized the list of 97 acceptable two letter words, from "aa" to "yo."

Only the Scrabble player could rattle off the 21 'Q' words that don't use a "U," such as "Qindar" and "Qoph."

Only the Scrabble player singlehandedly supports the dictionary industry, buying up multiple copies of Webster's, poring over the 100,000 words of the Offical Scrabble Players Dictionary and highlighting noteworthy words like an anxious spelling bee contestant.

"I know to the average person it sounds like a total waste of time to study word lists, but it's fun for us," explains Paul Terry, a local Scrabble enthusiast and organizer of the annual Las Vegas SCRABBLE Tournament, which will feature over 145 players from across the nation this weekend at Palace Station.

Of those competitors, about 25 make their home in Las Vegas, meeting weekly at the three local Scrabble clubs: one at the Norwest bank at Flamingo and Rainbow on Wednesdays, another at Dorothy Halprin's house on Thursday's, and the Tuesday night group gathered in Gerry Greenside's living room, to bone up for the upcoming tournament.

Serious Scrabble

These are hardly what the Scrabble diehards quaintly call "parlor" players, their less proficient Scrabble brethren.

They are experts who bring to the table their rotating $140 custom-order marbleized boards that swivel around for competition play, their personalized tile bags reading "I love this game," their dictionaries lovingly covered with corduroy slipjackets.

Rosemary Ryan has gone high-tech, buying a $2,000 computer and enrolling in a computer class for seniors at the community college -- all to be able to play her favorite game on Scrabble's new CD-ROM computer version.

The room is fairly quiet, save for Irene Cara singing "What a Feeling" from "Flashdance," the clicking of tiles and the murmuring of double word scores being counted.

The only sign of pressure comes from the competition stop clocks silently clicking down the 25 minutes of regulation play.

"Scrabble," declares Greeenside, "is just like chess, but you just don't hear about it. But the people are just as fanatical."

Unfortunately, so far, Nike hasn't shown an interest in putting some sponsorship dollars towards the Scrabble circuit, which includes about 10,000 National Scrabble Association members competing in the 170 annual tournaments, with one going on every weekend around the country.

Only Hasbro, the proud makers of Scrabble, has ponied up about $100,000 in prize money to support the 12-member American team's presence in the biannual world championship, which was held last week in Washington.

The new winner, 35-year-old Bronx, N.Y. native Joel Sherman, is rumored to be making an appearance at the Las Vegas tournament.

"He is the rudest person I've ever met," sniffs Las Vegas Scrabble player Joan Barbour, who is not thrilled by the news. "He doesn't have any manners."

But Greenside is more respectful of what it takes to be a winner. "To be a world champion," he says "you have to have a photographic memory -- and devote hours of studying."

The wonder of words

For to the Scrabblers, words are more than just a form of communication or a way to ace your SATs -- they are something to be bartered, savored, even revered.

They all marvel over one another's legendary plays, such as a Phoenix player who once turned "existent" into "existentialism." ("It went all the way across the board, and it was like, WOW!" Terry gushes.)

They swap mnemonics like trading cards, such as the exceptions to the rule about "i before e except after c": "Neither financier seized either foreign species of chiefs weird leisure."

They chortle over their favorite winning words, such as Terry's vowel-stuffed "ouisitti" (pronounced wheeze-titti). "Look at all the i's in it," he says delightedly.

There's just one problem in relying too heavily on Scrabble players as salvation for the Strunk & White set.

"I know a lot of crazy words," says Greenside, "but they're useless in anything but this game."

For all their knowledge of big-ticket words, the average professional Scrabble player puts little credence in using them outside of play.

Terry, a Swainston Middle School drama and music teacher, may know the meaning of ousisitti -- "it's a South African monkey" -- but he is a rarity in the rarified world of Scrabblemeisters.

Seldom can a Scrabble player tell you the meaning of that triple-point play word he just created -- or for that matter, use it in a sentence. Most are divided on whether understanding the words they are playing is necessarily a good thing.

"That's almost a miniature controversy in the Scrabble world," concedes Terry, offering a rare peek into the squabbles lurking beneath the surface of the Scrabble board.

"There are purists against someone playing a word they don't know -- usually people in the lower ranks, who are playing for the love of the game."

For those, however, who are playing for the love of money as well, definitions seem superfluous.

That's why the brand-new Official Tournament and Club Word List has shed those pesky definitions found in the previous Scrabble dictionaries and simply offers the words in list format.

"There's too many words to learn," explains Joe Edley, a two-time national Scrabble champion and associate director of the National Scrabble Association, based in Greenport, N.Y. "The time you spend learning meanings, you're not going to learn another word."

And there are words, by God, to learn. Words like "sovkhovy," of which Edley admits he doesn't know the meaning, but you have to admit is a heck of a word, one you'll rarely see in Scrabble action -- unlike the more mundane "toenail," which, for some reason, seems to pop up once in every tournament.

Vulgar or viable?

But while the players say word meanings are absolutely irrelevant, Scrabble corporate might disagree.

After a complaint about the presence of (gasp!) dirty language in the second edition a few years ago, the company came out with a third edition ("the politically correct edition," sneers Edley), to eliminate the filth, largely in deference to the company's desire to market the game to schools.

"There was a big uproar," recalls Terry, offering yet another glimpse into the seemingly contentious Scrabble world. "Players work hard at learning the word list."

In other words, they didn't take lightly to having their vulgarities snatched from play.

"Why take out a word like "fart" or "Jew"? asks Terry. "They're not derogatory on the board, just in the way you use them. But some were in favor of eliminating words because of their emotional power."

In the end, the rebellious players stuck with the second edition, dirty words and all, supplementing it with a new list to memorize -- 1300 new words that had been added to the chaste version.

But it is not the words they still have to learn that haunts them, it is the words that got away, the ones they could have sworn were legitimate but aren't that haunt them, like phantom aches from missing limbs.

"Unpadded," Greenside says, berating himself for a word that proved false, known as a "phony." "I would have bet my life on it! -- I know I have unpadded gloves."

Down the table, Miriam Green is also bemoaning the nonexistence of the word 'wavesets,' which cost her a closely contested match against Terry, in a 318 to 347 loss.

"It was a good try," Terry says, pulling out his pocket calculator Official Scrabble Dictionary. "but I'm going to challenge it if I haven't heard of it."

The nonexistence of the word is still irking her minutes later.

"I still think wavesets should be a word," sniffs Green, a Cunningham Elementary School third grade teacher who runs an after-school Scrabble club for students."Wavesets. It's a permanent, you know?"

But other players express disdain at using a word that doesn't exist.

"I don't have to play a phony," notes Scrabble player Mark Immerman. "I know too many real words."

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