Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999
From: Jim Geary
To: cgp
Subject: re: What's the Big SUBIDEA?

This is the old "let's dumb Scrabble down to my level" theory. Some of us know what these words mean. Some of us are still learning them as we go. Some of us refuse to acknowledge that the words we didn't know before our first meeting at a Scrabble club our in fact genuine. The funniest set is those that think that the words I've learned since my first Scrabble visit are genuine, but the words I've yet to learn are not. Everyone goes through this phenomenon of learning a word playing Scrabble and then magically it's in some article you read the next week. What happens is it was there all along, just your brain skips over it while you're reading. This has personally happened to me in the last week with susurrus and worricow.

As an aside, everytime someone posts to cgp that "xxx" is not a word, they are invariably embarrassed.
Posting tip: Don't confuse what you don't know with what isn't known.

JG

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Diane Firstman wrote:

 Speaking of "SUBIDEA", as I was doing in my last post, I happened to play
 that very word in a friendly game over the weekend.
 
 When I first saw the rack ... I thought "DAUBIES"?  Not.   Hmm .... SUB
 something .... then I came across SUBIDEA.  I instantly thought that it was
 a non-word, at least as far as most of us would be concerned in everyday
 life.  But then, out of the deepest recesses of my mind (Aisle 47, halfway
 down the left side, 3rd row, next to the Doritos), came a vague remembrance
 of seeing that "word" somewhere .... I KNEW I saw it .... I was quite sure I
 had never seen it in "the real world", so I instantly thought, "its a list
 word".
 
 So, I played it.  My opponent, Marty Fialkow, a similiarly-rated player,
 challenged the play.  When I looked it up, and showed him that it was indeed
 "good", he asked me how I knew it.  I sheepishly said, "I think its one of
 those list words."
 
 He just accepted that and we continued to play.  But something about that
 whole incident has bugged me since then.
 
 Yes, Scrabble may be, as one of the t-shirt slogans puts it, "your word
 against mine",  but what happens when its a word neither player would ever
 know/use in everyday life?  No one has ever, ever spoken the word SUBIDEA in
 front of me.  I've never read it in any piece of literature.  So, the ONLY
 way I would ever use it would be to learn it for the sole purpose of this
 game.
 
 And somehow ... that seems "wrong".  That isn't Scrabble.  That's "I can
 memorize more combinations of letters than you can, and can recall them
 better".  Is that what tournament Scrabble is supposed to be about?
 
 I almost felt GUILTY about playing SUBIDEA, because I knew it was a "word",
 and I KNEW Marty would challenge it, because I had studied more word lists.
 Is there something wrong with this?
 
 SUBIDEA is an absolutely stupid "word", and its inclusion in our official
 word list, like so many other words, I believe cheapens the game a bit.
 Words that no one use with even the slightest bit of regularity litter the
 official source. And WHY are they included, because a few "big name"
 dictionaries list it.  (By the way .... SUBIDEA is NOT in MW10).
 
 Maybe I'm being a bit juvenile or altruistic, but just because this is not
 "kitchen table" Scrabble doesn't mean we should be encouraging rote
 memorization of quasi-words.
 
 Sigh ... but I do love this game.  I really do.  I played 33 games over the
 past 2 weekends, and I never got tired of it.  So I guess I've "bought into"
 the "words" that are dealt to me.
 
 But something seems amiss.

But Wait, There's More

Date: Tue, 5 Oct, 1999
From: Jim Geary
To: cgp
Subject: RE: Re: [cgp] What's the big SUBIDEA?

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Ross-Greene, Andrea (LAX) wrote:

 What were you reading that contained the word "susurrus" and "worricow"?
 Sounds interesting. 

Susurrus was in a biography of Feynman referring to the muted whispers of other physicists I think, and worricow was in some magazine article referring to someone impish, but I don't recall what it was tho I'm pretty sure it wasn't Dr. Dobb's Journal.

And still more

Followup and coda:

As I read on last night I came across two cool words that were only acceptable in British/SOWPODS, tho I completely forgot what they were. For real serendipity, about a month ago, this guy at work is testing my anagramming and pulls out a dictionary and gives me AFHIORSTY. I'm guessing along the lines of tovarishch or something like that. He wins and tells me the answer. (This is the exception not the rule; the other day I got AACIIJNOTTT in 1 sec.) THE VERY NEXT DAY, I'm just starting this book and on page 18 or so they talk about how when he was a boy, Feynman liked to stare out his back window at the FORSYTHIA. Proof positive that all the words you don't know are out there waiting for you to learn them.

And finally

On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, S. Tiekert wrote:

 [major snip]
 >stare out his back window at the FORSYTHIA.  Proof positive that
 >all the words you don't know are out there waiting for you to learn
 >them.
 
 I'll raise you one on the above - I'll bet big bux that given the 
 same tiles Diane would have gotten that word without ever reading about 
 Feynman.

Thereby underscoring my original point, whatever that was.

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