Blog Number 187

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

As I mentioned previously, we have been hitting the board games pretty hard lately.  Well the wife and I broke out the Scrabble game the other night.  Now I thought that I knew how to play Scrabble.  Actually, I know how to play, but I thought I knew how to keep score at Scrabble but now I am not sure.  My score was almost 500 points and the directions stated that a good Scrabble player usually scored between 300 - 400 points.  So either I got lucky or I have no idea how to keep score.

I started the game with the work "rite" and was off to a good start.  The directions also say that you should agree with the other players what dictionary you will use as a reference when a player is challenging that a word exists.  As husband and wife, I thought that we need not agree to this so I did not mention this fact.  This decision soon backfired on me as she added a "b" in front of "rite" and I immediately challenged.  Not having a dictionary in the house we used Mr Google.  The wife was using brite as in Lite-Brite however that is not allowed as proper nouns are against the rules.  I looked at a few dictionary sites but could not find the word brite (except for referencing Lite-Brite or other games / products with this mis-spelling).  But one last ditch effort resulted in finding an entry in Webster's 1913 dictionary...

Brite - To be or become overripe, as wheat, barley, or hops.

So I had to allow her to use the word.  But wait, it gets better.  Later in the game (when we had only the hard letters left) she asked if ***** was a word (since it sounded really familiar to her).  I am using ***** as I do not want to mention the actual word.  I knew what the word was so I smiled and said to her, "I know for a fact that ***** is a word."  She asked me what the word meant.  I just answered, "Let me put it this way, YOU have one and I don't."  Now this peaked her curiosity and Mr. Google soon revealed to her the meaning of the word and we had a big laugh over the whole thing.  We also decided that if we played this game with our (soon to be) 9 year old son, the we should abide by the rule - "just because a word exists does not mean that we should use it in Scrabble."

Anyway, I have to finish the blog as the wife has the Scrabble game out.  I just need to remind her that we are NOT using Webster's 1913 dictionary as our reference point.  Until next time...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon