I used to consume Scrabble like some people consume meth. It was really the only game that ever held my attention, other than chess. I played every day. I seldom ended a two person game with fewer than 400 points. A bad game was one with no bingos. I played so much and so often, online and off, that I eventually had to just give it up cold turkey, as I’d done years before playing chess. I got so deep into it, I’d play first thing in the morning on waking up, like a smoker with that cigarette. The headspace was somewhere between addiction and OCD, which are really related, I suppose, in terms of control. Anyway, here’s an article delving into how the rules should be applied. … … … … No, it’s YOUR leg that’s shaking under the table.
Can you play the word FART in Scrabble? The short answer calls on the old adage: your house, your rules. The long answer, investigating the question of exactly which words are valid, is much more interesting. Like language itself, Scrabble’s list of playable words is living and evolving, even branching into new subspecies if you extend that metaphor. Attempts to make hard rules about what’s allowed reveal myriad edge cases, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Of course, the real question isn’t about FART at all, but more offensive words. Ultimately, the history of the Scrabble dictionary and its most controversial entries is both twisty and still unfolding.
Look, I have no idea what any of this non-fungible token thing means, but apparently it’s coming for us one day, so someone please explain it to me… and someone else find a word we can replace “fungible” with ASAP;
Is scholarly writing too difficult to read? Depends on your interpretation of the structuring structures that structure possible grammars as semantic symbols associated with concrete descriptors of a malleable physical reality…;
This “The Green Knight” trailer is making a strong appeal to nerd-me to force poetry-me to loosen up about how I feel about the fact that the movie was made in the first place…;
Emerging writer award list includes some familiar faces, Michelle Good, Desmond Cole among them (some writers don’t “emerge”, s much as blink into existence, fully formed);
This article hits a few nerves. I have a large variety of children in my life and about half of them are readers. Of those directly around me, the eldest, a woman of 23, is a reader, the next a young man of 20 is not. The 18-year-old fellow reads constantly, but mostly the same novels over an over, and the 13-year-old would-be skate punk does not go near anything that isn’t illustrated in Japan.
I can’t tell you why some will read and some won’t. They all got read to as babies and children, they all had scads of books available — but at some point, some of them stopped. I can only hope they’ll come back, and suspect they will in some ways, but the entire delivery method may have changed by then.
Listen, I throw my hands up. They’re not dead. They have enough pocketed pizza for snacks. Their shoes get replaced every six months as their toes come up against the leather. They’re one-by-one making it to adulthood with only minor traumas. Given the state of things these days, I feel like that’s the bar I’m shooting for.
From birth to about eight years old, it all went fine: I tried some of the stuff I had loved as a kid, and they found that too boring, but it didn’t matter, because hark, new books are written constantly, and the fountain of Wimpy Kid is, like the one in scriptures, ever flowing, its waters in perpetual motion (plus, did you see the latest film? It’s genuinely, stone-cold-classic good). Both kids got into the Maze Runner books at about the same time as they decided it was beneath their dignity to be read to together, and if there is an act of greater parental devotion than to read the entire, turgid trilogy, then go back to the beginning and read it again; I don’t know what that would look like.
It’s Friday and I’m swamped with other work (which is why no posts yesterday), but I’m trying to not leave you in the lurch for your goofing off on the last day of the week. See, unlike your bosses, I know you’re screwing around there at your desk with a spreadsheet open in the background, ready to be foregrounded at a moment’s notice if someone walks by. I’m just thankful you’re choosing to read bookish things instead of playing Minesweeper. Listen, it’s 2021 — we have to take the little victories.
Bookninja 