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Scrabble babble

Posted By: Nack Ballard
Date: Monday, 22 November 2010, at 6:43 p.m.

In Response To: A Few Responses on Offensive Language, Stick and Stones, and Political Correctness (Daniel Murphy)

Nack, reluminate me. Are all words that are always capitalized in English excluded from the official Scrabble dictionaries?

Yes.

Also, what's the highest scoring play you ever made in competition?

Nothing that stood out in my memory over the others. I've had a few exceeding 200 and a few close to 200. In truth, a "triple-triple" (a word played to cover two TWS premium squares on the same turn) can often be an easy play to find and largely a matter of luck. Without blanks, triple-triple bingos score 122 points at the minimum.

I have the distinction of being the person with the highest single-turn play ever played against him. On Nov. 6th, 1990, I was battling the legendary Lester Schonbrun. On Lester's fifth move (ninth play of the game) he played EXTOL H11 (57) -- i.e., down to the bottom middle TWS for 57 points. I answered with LIROTH N1 (47) to retake a 21-point lead. This unfortunately but necessarily hung an L on the triple-triple line and Lester pounced with FRENZILY 8A for 347 points. He beat me 710-409.

And can you use euouae and twyndyllyng in a sentence ;-

I'd never heard of the latter, though 11-letter words seldom arise in Scrabble. Perhaps my twyndyllyng Nick has heard of it.

I only vaguely knew the meaning of EUOUAE, but Wikipedia chimes in:

    Euouae is a mnemonic which was used in medieval music to denote the sequence of tones in the "seculorum Amen" passage of the lesser doxology, Gloria Patri. In plainchant sources, the differentia, that is, the melodic formula to be sung at the end of every line of chanted psalmody, would be written over either the letters EUOUAE, or merely E----E, representing the first and last vowel of "seculorum Amen."

Unfamiliarity of a word's meaning has never stopped me from playing it. As we warmed up for the WSC (World Scrabble Championship) of 1993, my opponent Joe Edley (three-time National Champ) had earlier played AERATInG N8 (68). I had just bingoed myself and drew the rack AEEOUUU. Fortunately, that allowed me the parallel play shown below, off the last five letters of Joe's bingo. EUOUAE was only 23 points, but without the existence of that all-vowel word I would have had to exchange tiles (take a zero).

EA
UT
OI
Un
AG
E

Even the rack leave of the third U worked out. I drew the Q and had the pleasant choice on the following turn of EQUINE 15A (48) or my actual move of QUINCE 4A (54).

Joe one-upped my parallellism with one of his own in the next game. He met my bingo of TAENIATE 11E (66) with the 92-point play shown below (the R is on a DWS) underneath my word, simultaneously forming eight words. (I emboldened the upper word only so that the variable width letters in this font would better vertically align.)

...TAENIATE
.....SHUNTER

In case you wondered, EUOUAE, EA, TAENIATE and TE are British-only words, as was OI at the time. (OI made it into OSPD-4).

Nack

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