Saturday Night Scrabble

New and old words

Keely and Taurus came for pizza on Saturday night, and after supper, Keely, Isaac, and I played a game of Scrabble on Keely's extra-large board.

Isaac played "LEET" and said it was an alternative internet language. It wasn't in the dictionaries we were using, and I had never heard of it. With some indignation and a bit of scorn, Isaac produced an Urban Dictionary definition of leet on his laptop and educated me.

Today, I looked up leet at www.dict.org and learned that it has some traditional meanings as well. It's another name for a pollack (a type of fish), and it also has some legal meanings.  If you don't see LEET on the gameboard, that's because someone added an F and made it "FLEET."

"POO" was also one of Isaac's words. Isaac thought I was picking on him when I checked to see if poo was in the dictionary. He shouldn't have worried. According to the yellowed pages of a 1961 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary that we had on the table, poo is a verb of Scottish derivation that means "pull".

I played "PENT" and the kids questioned it because it's usually heard as "pent-up". Of course, it's in the dictionary. Pent is an old variant of "penned", meaning "confined or caged". Really, would I try to invent a word, children? (Don't answer that question, please. It's strictly rhetorical.)

We didn't reach many of the quadruple word squares at the edges of the board. I think it was because Keely was hoarding all the good letters. (Just kidding, Keely!). Below, her letters at one point in the game -- nary a vowel amongst them. If she had known about the Scrabble Solver, she would have been wanting to use it!