[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'.