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“Bae, dae, fae, gae, hae, kae…” Before any Scrabble tournament, I’d wander the halls like a Tibetan monk, mumbling scripture. “Even thy meek beef wedges,” I’d say, another ploy to retrieve each -AE combo, ignoring the mnemonic’s every E to keep the consonants: VNTHYMKBFWDGS.
So deep went my geekery, I’d lose sight of words as units of meaning. Take red, say. We know the colour, but immersed in Scrabble-think, you only see the hook-plays, treating RED as a chance to make ARED, BRED, CRED, ERED, etc, on one plane, and something high-scoring on the perpendicular.
Debates over slurs and plurals are causing tension among the game’s professionals.Credit: Simon O’Dwyer
Instead of red, the word, you succumb to red, the Triple Word Score. Or RED, the cluster bank, where prime scaffolds like RE- and -ED can help build all-tile bingos, gaining a 50-point bonus for your trouble.
And trouble, as it happens, is what engulfs modern Scrabble. Andrew Fisher, an Australian maestro, calls it a schism. Stefan Fatsis, the US voice of Scrabble, prefers a fracturing. Either way, it’s a dog’s breakfast, the whole mess linked to a bunch of baffling letters.
Back at square one, there was OSW, or Official Scrabble Words, a master list of legit plays drawn from Chambers. Meanwhile, North America favoured the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary – or OSPD – derived from Merriam-Webster. Over time, those two lists merged into SOWPODS, an anagram-acronym soon rivalled by CSW, or Collins Scrabble Words, which absorbed SOWPODS but then “added many Maori words – like REO, TAONGA, TIRITI – and other good stuff,” recounts Fisher.
Enter John Chew, the chief executive of NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association, who ousted vulgarities from the OSPD listings back in 2020, including REDNECK, SPAZ and YID. Few argued. LEZ may be a handy Z-coup, say, but society has since evolved. Scrabble needed edifying.
Until this year’s backflip. While some words remain taboo, plenty of exiles have been readmitted. Like an unwoke reawakening, the N-word is out, yet MULATTO and ASPIE are suddenly viable again. “Nobody was asking to reinstate half the slurs,” as Josh Sokol, the 2023 US champ said in Fatsis’ recent Slate feature. “Nobody.”
Compounding the chaos, a smatter of bogus plurals has also lobbed. ROUX, the kitchen base, is both singular and plural, but now ROUXES is deemed match-fit by Chew’s revamp, along with FECESES and DEBRISES which don’t exist. Or not beyond the OSPD universe.
The glitch hinges on the “front-matter rule”, as Fatsis laments, where any noun is falsely deemed -S worthy unless otherwise stipulated. Then there’s the drop-down function on Merriam’s homepage, a medley of “false positives” designed to lead users to towards valid entries. A menu may offer BRUTALER, say, which doesn’t own full “word status” in the lexicon, yet its mention as a BRUTAL signpost sees the non-word endorsed.
Yet the feceses really hit the fan, as Fisher explains, when different lists govern different contests. At home, say, NSW accepts most vulgarities, unlike “the woker Victoria”. Meanwhile, plenty of homegrown stuff – like rakali and micronap, or even dud as verb – are still vetoed, unless Macquarie is amalgamated into the database.
Confused? I don’t blame you. This year in Vegas, where Fisher placed fifth in the world and Melbourne’s David Eldar won overall with the likes of FYCE and SOSATIE (an African meat dish), the word HAOLE (Hawaiian for a white person) was challenged as a deemed slur, only to be passed. As for HUBRISES, given this latest muddle, who among the elite would have enough cojoneses to play it?
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