[Cushman]

Good analogy, actually. There is a popular perception that being good at chess indicates skill at strategy or reasoning. In reality, these are helpful, yes, but mostly what it indicates is that you know a lot about the game of chess. Similarly, there is a perception that skill at Scrabble indicates a large English vocabulary.

It's reasonable for someone with good reasoning or a large vocabulary to find it distasteful that they lose consistently simply because they haven't memorized the 1,000 most common moves.[0] In chess, this is pretty much built into the mechanics of the game, but it's easy to fix in Scrabble with a simple house rule: Don't use bullshit words.

It's only part of the game if you let it be.

[0] I'll give an illustrative example. The official Scrabble dictionary[1] lists "re" with the definition "the second tone of the diatonic musical scale". Just so for the other sounds of diatonic solfeggio that everyone knows: re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. All of these, according to Hasbro, are English words, with plurals.

We're all descriptivists here, that's fine. But did you ever wonder why there are only seven words for the diatonic scale, but actually twelve tones in an octave? Or why re, mi, and fa have different vowel sounds? The answer is that solfege has a way to verbalize accidentals (notes not in the key) or non-diatonic scales by modulating the vowel sound. A raised do is a di; a lowered re is a ra. So you can easily pronounce a chromatic scale beginning at do: do, di/ra, re, ri/me, mi, fa, fi/se, sol, si/le, la, li/te, ti, do. (The syllable used depends on the key.)

Go ahead, look up any of those accidental syllables in the dictionary. La and le: Both French articles, both solfeggio syllables. Only one is a Scrabble word. You can't say that's not stupid.

[1] http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/search.cfm

[arthurdenture]

You've just moved the line of argumentation: instead of "is the word in the dictionary we're using", it's "is that word a bullshit word" -- but only one of those questions is answerable definitively. The only way to play without argument is to use a dictionary, at which point you might as well use the standard one.

(Like another poster in this thread, I do also play friendly games with an open two-letter-word list, to level the playing field for people who don't care to memorize trivia.)

[Cushman]

I gave the example to illustrate what I mean by "bullshit word", but the question is more or less this: Are you using this word because it's a word you know, or because it's a word you found in a list of Scrabble words?

I'm not saying that the idea of a canonical word list doesn't make game-mechanical sense, just that it turns Scrabble from a word game into a list of symbols game in a way that seems stupid to me.

It's not meant to be more than an intuitive house rule to encourage people to play with "real" words.

[Dylan16807]

It's a demonstration that scrabble's dictionary uses completely arbitrary and unpredictable methods to choose which bullshit words it has. It can't even use the excuse it's trying to be 'complete'.