Struck wordless by futility

SMH

KILLER: What better why to kill time on Sunday afternoon than a game of Scrabble?

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Joe Bennett

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OPINION: Sunday afternoon, when time drags like a wet mattress. What better to shift the mattress, to kill the time, than a game of Scrabble?

Apparently the Queen Mother loved Scrabble. It and gin (which is not to be confused with 'gin and It', a drink gone sadly out of fashion these days, but that could buckle the knees of a stallion) got the Queen Mum through 101 years of royal afternoons.

I can understand her need for gin. Without the mild anaesthesia of drink, how could anyone endure a century of waving with apparent good humour to an adoring mob of the deferentially dumb?

But Scrabble? Presumably the Queen Mum, despite her gossamer frocks and her lavender gloves and her indomitable wave, was as short of conversation and as ferociously competitive as the rest of us.

Scrabble did not have auspicious beginnings. It was invented shortly after World War II by an unemployed architect.

That little nugget should ring warning bells. Though half the world's cities lay in ruins, this architect couldn't find work. The architect's name, and I can't help thinking this significant, was Butts.

Astonishingly Mr Butts didn't name the game after himself. Instead he called it Lexico. It sold like cold sick. But a year or two later he rechristened it Scrabble and the sick warmed up.

Sixty years on it still sells a couple of million sets a year in the United States alone.

I don't know why he chose the name Scrabble. According to my best friend in this world, the Concise OED - may the good Lord bless it and keep it - the word scrabble derives from a Dutch word meaning to scrape.

It's retained much of that meaning. Rats' feet scrabble on broken glass; hobos scrabble in dumpsters; drowning kittens scrabble in weighted sacks. Scrabble, in other words, implies frantic desperation. Which brings us back to Sunday afternoon.

The human beast is comically inconsistent. We live in terror of our days coming to an end. But we already have far more days than we know what to do with. Hence Sunday afternoon ennui. Hence the proliferation of crosswords, jigsaws, patience, sudoku, pastimes in general and Scrabble in particular.

Some pastimes have had a bad press. Computer games, for example, are blamed for childhood obesity and homicidal rampages, though I'd be more inclined to point the finger at bad parents and worse gun laws.

But everyone thinks well of Scrabble. No-one has ever accused Scrabble of inducing some friendless teenager to reach for dad's Kalashnikov.

I suspect that people think well of Scrabble because Scrabble deals in words. Words suggest education. So Scrabble is educational.

Well now, I watched a game the other evening in, of all places, the pub. A pub is a place to talk. Pub talk is collaborative.

It builds airy castles that keep growing for as long as the bar stays open. But Scrabble is not collaborative. It is competitive. The two players were no longer using words for pleasure. They were using them in loaded silence. They wanted to win.

If Monopoly is parody capitalism, then Scrabble is parody academia. The winner gets to occupy an imagined professorial chair from which he can look down on the defeated below, put his thumb to his nose, wiggle his fingers and jeer, "I'm cleverer than you are."

Only he isn't. The first quality required to win Scrabble is luck. Assuming a moderate familiarity with the language, your fate is written on the tiles you draw from the bag.

The game I watched ended as every game of Scrabble ends. One player had a rack containing a Q and a string of vowels. The vowels did not include a U. His opponent had no vowels at all. His line of high-value consonants read like the Shanghai phone directory.

Cue the second quality required by the successful Scrabbler, a knowledge of words that have no practical use, words that the gentle OED retains only because it hasn't the heart to toss them out.

Words marked 'obs' or 'arch' or 'dial'. Words like xu, zho, and dzo, all of which I have just looked up. Dzo means the hybrid offspring of a cow and a yak. So does zho. Xu means one hundredth of a dong. Which is precisely how much any of these words are worth.

Scrabble is as pointless as Sunday afternoon. But did you know that there are international Scrabble competitions?

Or that the grandmasters of Scrabble spend most of their free time memorising vast lists of words of no practical use to man or yak? Or that there is a website dedicated to the Scrabble Olympics? I've seen it. I'd advise you not to. It reads like Sunday afternoon distilled. It'll drive you to gin.

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