Scrabble friends Facebook, innit Aficionados of Scrabble can as of right now deploy "Facebook", "blook", "wiki", "webzine" and "inbox" without fear of their opponent calling foul, following the incorporation of the terms into the list of Collins Official Scrabble Words. The first update to the Scrabblers' bible since 2007 includes 3,000 newly approved words …
As you demonstrated yourself. If something can be "facebooked" then the act of facebooking something is to facebook it.
It might sound awful now, but it's really not much different to hoovering the floor, tarmacing the road, sellotaping things together or photoshopping the evidence.
'Aficionados of Scrabble can as of right now deploy "Facebook", "blook", "wiki", "webzine" and "inbox"
Not if they're playing in my house they can't. I play the real rules : no names, no slang, no abbreviations and no American English. Any player whose word scores fewer points than the preceding one loses an item of clothing and drinks a shot.
Im no lingusitc purist but i think you will all agree that the deathknell of the language is being sounded when a word such as grrl makes it on to the official list for anything (well except maybe the official ist of words on a job application which call for automatic rejection).
Tombstone icon, not for el reg but for our poor beloved language...
A documentary about international Scrabble competitions showed how it was possible for people who can't speak English to win tournaments. They don't need to know the words, just that the collection of tiles is valid for the game.
As such there is no 'deathknell' (death-knell?) as the language is not being used - only a collection of symbols that have may different ways they can be arranged, many of which are valid according to the rules of the game.
'Our beloved language' is a mongrel anyway, a rag-tag collection of words from invaders or invadees that reflects the history of this septic isle.
An alternative reading of the situation would be that English has been so popular and successful that as more people use it more "contributions" (with or without the quotation marks) are made to it. I say celebrate it and be proud.
I enjoy a beautifully authored piece as much as the next man, but language is a living, growing thing, not a snapshot of a standard frozen in time.
Not to mention the huge advantage of being understood practically anywhere.
Paging James D Nicholl: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary."
English constantly grows, adapts and changes. If you want a language that doesn't, try French which has laws to protect it (not that many people pay attention to them)
I have the iOS version. It's a joke. If the computer opponent picks up a blank tile, it will sit on it until the end of the game and be caught with it on its rack. Every single time.
If EA let its slaves have the occasional evening off every few months, they might have a chance of blundering into the kind of intelligent algorithms that other programmers knew about twenty years ago.
The Official Word List (OWL) is the only acceptable list in virtually all Scrabble clubs in North America - it's the only list used in tournament Scrabble. SOWPODS is used elsewhere based on the Collins list but if Collins keeps acting like a cheap whore (acceptable in SOWPODS and OWL) then I see a good chance that the world Scrabble community will start to move towards OWL for competition.
What you do at home is your own business but in public you'd better be using the correct wold list or else you're going to be challenged ... and you'll lose.
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