"If it helps me get rid of those tiles..."

While playing in the Loveland Scrabble tournament, Rich and I and the other players were waiting around for the games to start because two people were arriving late.

And I commented on *some* word that shouldn't have been in the Dictionary, in my opinion. Can't remember which word I said (there are so many that I think shouldn't be in there) but one of the other players agreed that it was a dumb word, but shrugged it off. "If it helps me get rid of those tiles.."


And I think that's the rationale behind the introduction of probably half of those words in the Scrabble Dictionary that DO NOT belong - thousands of words from other languages that aren't loan words, they are not in common use in the US and never will be.

In my imagination it's something like this.

Two very highly ranked Scrabble players are playing, and one of them has the tiles FOOTIER on their tile rack. And that's not a word so they can't play it.

And the guy gets annoyed by this and goes to the Scrabble Dictionary people and says, "Hey, FOOTIER should be in the dictionary." And they put it in so this guy, if he has an F and two 0s, can get a bingo with those letters.

Whereas a word like "redoers" - people who have to redo their tasks - sounds like it should be an acceptable word, but it isn't!  (I bingoed with that, until my opponent challenged it.)

But FOOTIER is an acceptable word?

To that end, I'm going to start a Rational Scrabble League. The goal, to have removed from the Scrabble Dictionary all words that are not loan words, or words in general use in the USA. In addition, if you play a word and can't define it, it comes off the board!

I think Scrabble would be a lot more popular among the general populace if it helped people build their vocabulary of words that they could use in the future, instead of words they'd never use except when playing Scrabble!