Word Nerd: Dispatches From the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground Read online

  I can’t speak for anyone else, but here’s how it happened for me. I literally can’t speak for anyone else, because I’m the only one who’s ever had the job. However, there was an official organization before the National SCRABBLE Association that went by the catchy name of SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game Players, Inc.

  The earlier organization was an in-house division of Selchow & Righter, then the SCRABBLE trademark holder and manufacturer. It was a relatively small, family-owned company, best known for SCRABBLE and Parcheesi. The SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game, Inc., unit was comprised of a company executive with a couple of assistants. No one in the organization admitted to being an accomplished SCRABBLE player, nor were any tournament players actively involved in the running of the organization.

  At the time, 1982, I was working out of our house in the country, trying to write a novel and doing advertising and public relations for a couple of clients both locally and in New York City. My brother-in-law worked at advertising giant J. Walter Thompson in Manhattan, where Selchow & Righter was a client. As often happens in that business, a colleague of his, John Nason, was leaving to move over to the “client side” to become the vice president of marketing for Selchow & Righter. As Nason’s new job would be on Long Island, about an hour from my home, it was suggested we meet.

  John Nason and I hit it off immediately. He was a thoughtful, smart, elegant man, who had cowritten an excellent book on advertising entitled Advertising: How to Write the Kind That Works. He was looking to form alliances in his new job and suggested that I might be able to contribute to the fledgling SCRABBLE Players Bulletin published by his company.

  That’s how it all started. I then spent a couple of years working with Nason’s colleague Jim Houle, a nice wacky-scientist kind of guy, who ran the SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game Players Division. I wrote some stories for their newspaper; I visited some official SCRABBLE clubs and, at Houle’s suggestion, entered a sanctioned SCRABBLE tournament in Connecticut.

  It was the first time in my life—but far from the last—that a number of SCRABBLE tournament players greeted me with a blend of suspicion and contempt. I had not done myself any favors in my presentation. For openers, I was wearing a jacket and tie, whereas the players were dressed somewhere between casual and sloppy. Most seemed serious, studious, and humorless. Worse, I was woefully unprepared. I’d barely glanced at the rules, had no idea of the insider’s list of key words, and did not give strategy a thought beyond finding a word on my rack and laying it on the board. Even though I’d been placed in the Novice Division, I was destroyed and humiliated in the first three games. My opponents didn’t seem to be having much fun either, despite their lopsided victories. At the end of the third game, the pleasant woman in her fifties who had just vanquished me leaned across the table. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but you’re in way over your head.”

  I immediately went over to Jim Houle, who, though not playing, had accompanied me. We agreed that my time would be better spent roaming the playing floor to observe some games and moves. I’d also have lunch and dinner with the players to be better understand both them and SCRABBLE’s appeal. In addition, I’d study some of the various written materials around the tournament, including newsletters, word lists, and flyers for upcoming tournaments and more.

  By the end of my first tournament weekend, I’d reached three critical realizations. First, there was obviously a lot more to the SCRABBLE subculture than I’d ever realized. Secondly, there was a lot more subtlety to the tournament game than to the living room version. Third, for thousands of people throughout North America, SCRABBLE was far more than a game. It was both a consuming passion and a significant part of their identity.

  So it became my job—a mission, ultimately—to recognize this curious passion and tell the story to the rest of the world.

  3

  HOW A WORD GETS INTO

  THE DICTIONARY

  PERHAPS THE MOST DOMINANT TOPIC OF conversation throughout my career has been the dictionary. This includes what words are admitted, what words are deleted, how often the dictionary is updated, and the difference between the “American” and the “British” dictionaries. How words get into your everyday desk dictionary is similar to how they find their way into SCRABBLE, so much of the discussion that follows applies to both.

  The NSA routinely received calls from indignant SCRABBLE players, many in disbelief that an entry in the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary is, in fact, a real word. These were mostly living room players as opposed to tournament players. The latter are so used to seeing crazy stuff pop up on an opponent’s board that nothing really surprises them, and many have a more-the-merrier attitude when it comes to admissible words.

  The aggrieved tend to be longtime casual players, who will frequently cite “the King’s English” as their guideline for what words are real and what words are not. The phrase I’ve probably invoked most often with them over the years is “With all due respect, just because you never heard of it does not mean it’s not a real word.” I, like my colleagues at Merriam-Webster, believe that the language is a living, breathing entity and that words, meaning, and even grammatical usage are going to change over the course of time. As well they should. Otherwise, we’d all be walking around talking like characters from Beowulf.

  Chief among the complaints are onomatopoetic words. Examples include MM, HM, HMM, WHOOSH, BRR, BRRR, and the like. These drive people crazy, despite the fact that they tend to be extremely playable and valuable words. I guess there are fewer Ogden Nash fans out there than I’d anticipated.

  Another irksome category for word complaints is foreign words. The general rule of thumb is this: if there is no English equivalent, the word finds its way into our everyday language, then onto the pages of the dictionary. There are numerous examples, among them TACO, ADIOS, CIAO (and its alternative spelling JIAO), SI, AMIGO, and CROISSANT. When I explain this criterion, it tends to mollify most complaints. And let’s face it. As the world gets smaller because of advances in technology and communication, this phenomenon is going to happen more, not less. This is especially relevant in regard to the Hispanification of the American culture and to the collision course the United States is on with the Middle East. Heck, twenty-five years ago most Americans had never even heard of Cinco de Mayo or a burka—let alone jihad.

  Foreign currency tends to annoy people the most. XU, for example, is a monetary unit of South Vietnam and an extremely valuable SCRABBLE word. (For some reason, it does not take an S.) A ZAIRE is a monetary unit of the former country of the same name. (No, I have no idea why there was such a lack of creativity in Zaire’s Treasury Department.) A frustrated SCRABBLE player—a retired schoolteacher—had had enough when she called the NSA to complain about the word. “I dare you,” she sputtered, “use the word in a sentence.”

  I thought for a moment. “How about a zaire for your thoughts?” I suggested. She hung up on me.

  Later, I told my NSA friend top tournament veteran Robert Kahn about the encounter. He laughed and said, “Be thankful she didn’t confront you about the word REI.”

  “How come?” I knew the word, of course, but never knew the meaning.

  “It’s probably the most indefensible word in the game,” he said. “Look it up.”

  I did. REI is “an erroneous English form for a former Portuguese coin.” Yeah, he has a point.

  This episode brings up the question: How exactly does a word find its way into the dictionary, and where do the words come from? I’ll answer the second part first. New words simply arise from the culture, as they have since the beginning of time, from many different corridors.

  Some new entries are foreign words being assimilated into English. Technology, recently more than ever, has contributed numerous terms and will continue to do so. Examples include EMAIL, BYTE, WEBMAIL, SPAM, and BITMAP.

  As hip-hop culture goes mainstream, it too will provide words and new meanings for existing words. PHAT has been acceptable
for some time, and CHILLAX became acceptable in 2014. Other acceptable slang words include AWOL, MOOLAH, YO, and COZ.

  Who finds these words, and how is it decided they are worthy of inclusion? The first round in the process is an activity called “reading and marking,” and it involves all of the editors at Merriam-Webster.

  Visit the desk of one of those editors on any given day and you’ll find piles of publications, e-mails, and research covering every aspect of language and society. For example, a reading pile might include such diverse sources as People magazine, the Congressional Record, a scientific journal, the National Enquirer, TV Guide, The New Yorker, Yankee magazine, an educational quarterly, and the like. The task is simple: to read in search of good examples of words used in context. And what are the editors looking for? Most obviously, examples of new words, but also old words being used in new ways, variant spellings, capitalization, inflected forms, and evidence for where the words show up—whether it be in glossy weekly magazines, the New York Times, scholarly journals, or even a comic strip. When editors find good examples (also called “citations”), they mark them and send them to a data-entry group that enters them into the citation database. And when the editors have enough citations for a new word, it becomes eligible for admission into the next edition. This is a simplification of the process, believe me, but that is fundamentally how it works. For perspective, know that the Merriam-Webster citation file has citations dating back as far as the 1890s—more than sixteen million of them.

  While this process has served us well, it is not immune to changing times—specifically technology and social media. So I asked my colleagues at Merriam-Webster if Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the like will streamline the inclusion process in terms of both speed of acceptance and volume of words. Is it possible that new media staples such as LOL, WTF, and BTW will ultimately be viewed as actual “words” and find their way onto a SCRABBLE board?

  John Morse, president of Merriam-Webster, was the first to weigh in on the subject. “My initial comment is that the term ‘social media’ takes in a lot of different kinds of communications. For example, in the physical world, all evidence of language use is noteworthy, but an example of a word taken from the front page of the New York Times is going to be more significant than an example taken from a family photograph album. And I think the same applies with social media.” Hence the question becomes: How does a “new” word on someone’s Facebook page rate in significance compared to one in a Twitter post from, say, the Associated Press? Only time—and future technology—will tell.

  Morse agrees that the new-word inclusion process is speeding up. “I would say that the process has already speeded up significantly, and yes, that has happened because of the Web. My sense is that twenty years ago, the shortest lag (with a few notable exceptions) was around ten years, and a typical lag might be closer to twenty. And now, many words are getting in with a lag of five to ten, and sometimes faster than that.” He goes on to say, “I do think the overall observation is correct: words establish themselves in the language faster, and we detect that sooner than before. And that happens because of the existence of the Web.”

  Stephen Perrault, Merriam-Webster’s director of defining—now there’s a great job title—says, “While we look to digital sources for evidence that we use as the basis for dictionary entries, we don’t at this point gather a lot of citations directly from social media.” So it appears that while social media will be increasingly a factor in determining dictionary inclusion, evidence from mainstream professionally written and edited sources still prevails.

  That said, Perrault reminds us, “I’ll note ‘the dictionary’ itself is now increasingly thought of as an online database rather than (or in addition to) a printed book, and that plays a role in speeding up the process as well.”

  For some reason, this topic reminds me of the overused quote attributed to Andy Warhol, that in the future “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” While we should probably take the statement at face value, there are some who feel the late Pop artist was a media visionary. They make the argument that he meant that one day there would be so much media that there would not be enough celebrities to go around. So, over the years, we have had to elevate the likes of 1994’s O. J. Simpson house-guest Kato Kaelin and today’s Kim Kardashian to take the place of, perhaps, Walter Cronkite and Grace Kelly. Will the demands of social media become so immediate and deep that there will not be enough new words to go around? I guess we’ll see.

  As I write this, I am personally involved in this process, following a proposed new definition of the word CATFISH. Here’s how it started.

  In 2010, two friends and collaborators, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, directed a documentary film entitled Catfish. It made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival to both wild acclaim and controversy. Catfish is a true story that documents the Internet love story of Yaniv “Nev” Schulman, Ariel’s brother, as he virtually meets, gets to know, and falls in love with a young woman he randomly met online. When Nev and the filmmakers decided to pay a surprise visit to the young woman, they found out she was not who she pretended to be. To begin with, she was married and perhaps twenty years older than her online persona.

  The woman’s husband actually inspired the film’s title. When told of his wife’s deception, he shared an anecdote about a curious practice in the fishing industry. It seems that in the old days cod had a tendency to get sluggish and mushy when being shipped from Alaska to China in large vats. Someone had the idea of throwing catfish into the mix to keep things vibrant and interesting. Hence he depicts his wife similarly, saying with a shrug, “There are those people who are catfish in life.”

  Fueled by both the Internet and traditional media, CATFISH became a pop culture term in a matter of months. The very first examples of a new meaning for the word were showing up. As a noun, a CATFISH was now an individual who pretended to be someone he or she was not on the Internet. As a verb, one could now get CATFISHED or deceived by an individual with a bogus identity.

  Below are a few sample excepts from the citation file at Merriam-Webster that traces the trail of its usage to the ultimate decision to admit CATFISH’s new meaning into the dictionary:

  After the film’s debut, a new definition emerged: “someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue online romances.”

  BOSTON GLOBE, January 27, 2013

  Criminal Minds star Thomas Gibson was duped two years ago by a stranger he met online, even sending her a steamy hot tub video. The 51-year-old actor . . . exchanged explicit photos and videos with the North Dakota woman before he discovered he was being catfished and cut off all contact.

  TMZ Australia, August 21, 2013

  On their new MTV show Catfish, Nev Schulman and Max Joseph help people in online relationships discover if they’re being duped. . . . After the Manti Te’o hoax . . . “catfish” became part of the national lexicon.

  PEOPLE, February 11, 2013

  So now you know how a word gets into the dictionary. It happens rarely, but over the years a handful of words have been removed from the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, or OSPD. I’m not talking about the “word purge” of allegedly offensive entries mentioned earlier but about random words that, upon review, were deemed inadmissible by the editors at Merriam-Webster. One that tournament SCRABBLE players miss a lot is KEV, a noun meaning, according to the second edition of the OSPD, “a unit of energy.” This was a handy word, allowing players to score well with the K and V while eliminating those cumbersome letters in favor of some more bingo-prone. (“Bingo” is an insider’s term for a play using all seven tiles.) However, it was ultimately decided that KEV was not a word but rather an abbreviation. Bummer.

  Another handy word removed from the OSPD in later editions was DA. It is an Italian preposition meaning “from,” as in the name of the explorer Vasco da Gama. However, it was eventually decided that DA
was too Italian, or perhaps only Italian. After further consideration, Merriam-Webster decided it was ciao for DA. But DA was not DOA for long. It resurfaced in the fifth edition in 2014, now defined as a term of endearment.

  One of my favorites is the word STETSON. It appeared in the original OSPD, defined as a “broad-brimmed hat.” However, STETSON was gone by the second edition, published in 1990. It had been determined by Merriam-Webster—and perhaps by attorneys from the hat company—that STETSON was a trademarked name, and hence properly capitalized and hence not playable according to Rule 8 of the SCRABBLE game. Yet it appears again today in the list of acceptable words for tournament play. What happened?

  STETSON was a case of diverging opinions from the two authorities who compile and select words for the OSPD and its companion volume, the Official Tournament and Club Word List, or OWL. The first group, of course, is the editorial staff at Merriam-Webster. The second is the official Dictionary Committee of, until 2013, the National SCRABBLE Association and currently NASPA, the NSA’s successor, the North American SCRABBLE Players Association. This is a group of hardcore word enthusiasts with strong opinions and the knowledge to back them up. As head of the NSA, I was automatically a member of the Dictionary Committee. I can say with certainty I did not make a single contribution to the Dictionary Committee in twenty-five years. I wouldn’t have dared.

  Just as civilians disagree about what words are good in SCRABBLE, the pros do as well. The NSA Dictionary Committee argued that STETSON falls into the same category as ASPIRIN or MIMEOGRAPH—brand names that culturally are frequently used as generic words. “Some words meet our criteria, but not Merriam-Webster’s,” notes former NASPA Dictionary Committee chairman Jim Pate. Remember, most tournament SCRABBLE players are looking for as many words to play as possible. Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, has to be mindful of the legal status of words. If a registered trademark is in effect, then the trademark status must be recognized and the word must be capitalized and hence falls prey to Rule 8.