How many points for THAT word?

Success is always a plus, but in Scrabble it earns only 11 points.

I’m headed toward failure (10 points) when my wife digs out the venerable game board for a seemingly innocuous hour of play on a winter night. In our house, Scrabble is a death sentence, and she the executioner.

It doesn’t matter if I spell words like “angelic” (10 points), “plenary” (12) or “caitiff” (15). She’ll come back with “cow” (24 points with the “w” on a triple-word-score space), “tax” (26 points with the normally 8-point “x” doing triple duty), and “king” (42 with double-letter score for the “K” and a triple-word bonus).

It’s enough to make me spell “castrate,” but even then I’ll get only 12 points.

What I lack is strategy, which is why a dull 6-year-old can annihilate me in checkers, and his equally dreary 8-year-old sister can do the same to me in chess. I am a guileless guy; pondering the long-range ramifications of anything beyond what will happen if I don’t stop for gas when the needle is on empty or why sticking my wet finger in a wall socket is a bad idea is beyond my walnut-sized brain.

“Don’t think of big words,” my wife advises. “Stick to little ones and put them in the best spots.” Her advice reflects her philosophy: All one- and two-syllable words to teach me to stop relying on three- and four-syllable ones.

Not that she doesn’t stack the Scrabble tiles against me. A few years ago, I caught her flipping a “V” upside down and using it as one of the two blank tiles. How long had this been going on? Cheaters never win, except at Scrabble, when maybe they emerge winners in almost every game for more than a decade.

Then there is the dictionary. Our official one is a little spiral-bound article that belonged to her grandmother. Apparently, it was bequeathed to my wife sometime during the Reagan presidency. An ancient K-Mart sticker on the cover, right next to the “America’s No. 1 best-selling dictionary” tagline, indicates it cost $1. The world map inside still shows East and West Germany. Heck, it probably shows the original 13 colonies.

It is the only volume we are allowed to use to settle disputes during game play, but any word of hers will be validated by the slim booklet, while any word of mine is conspicuously absent. I’m convinced I generate only new words, while she sticks to timeless classics. As words go, she’s classic rock; I’m hip-hop.

In the early days of our marriage, any aspersions cast on the dictionary (or suggestions that we upgrade to something with pages less yellow) brought out a pouting lip and charges that I was desecrating the memory of her dearly departed grandmother.

That gambit no longer works. Today, I have written across the title page, “Warning: This dictionary contains no words that could be even remotely helpful in playing Scrabble.”

Yet the dictionary remains. I openly mock it, but I’m not risking a family curse by arranging any accident for the book (maybe a chance encounter with the stovetop, for instance).

Things are looking up, however. In our last match, I took an early lead and held it throughout the game. At one time, I was ahead by 50 points, a lead which narrowed to less than 10 by game’s end, but I still won.

Whenever that happens – and it isn’t often – I refuse to play again for a while, preferring to bask in the glow of victory for months on end. But while I gloat, new words are introduced into the language, words that don’t have a chance of ever appearing inside the little spiral-bound dictionary, and I ruin my chances for next time.

It’s what’s known as a Catch-22, which would net me 12 points minimum, if there were numbers on a Scrabble board, which there aren’t.

There I go again, focusing on what can’t be, when I should be spelling “cat,” “dog,” and “toe” for uninspired but rock-solid points.


Originally published in 2009