Forget Brexit: the real international rift will be on the Scrabble board
For the UK, the months leading to mid-2019 are set to be challenging and highly volatile, as the world adjusts to a massive change in the international rules-based system. Rifts will emerge among the most reliable partnerships. And, during the negotiations, the mutual misunderstandings of the protagonists are set to lead to frosty stand-offs.
I refer, of course, not to Brexit, nor to the EU’S migration policy, nor even to the future of Nato. Each of these is a trifle to resolve, in comparison with the googly that has been bowled today in the world of Scrabble. You see, news has broken that the US publisher, Merriamwebster, has added 300 new words to the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD, for Scrabble nargs).
Merriam-webster’s additions include two new highly useful two-letter words – “Ew”! and “OK” – guaranteed to open up the board. In addition, oligarchs (or indeed anyone), will be entitled to lay down “bizjet” – a word which I have heard precisely none of the private jet crowd mention to describe their preferred mode of transport. The addition of the word “zen” surely stands to make the world just that. Except, not yet.
No, the months leading to mid-2019 will be torturous because Scrabble has long been divided by one of the world’s greatest non-tariff barriers. In one corner stands the circa 187,000word OSPD, which forms the basis of the word list used for tournament play in North America. Our Western cousins are (relatively) men of few words, as laconic as John Wayne. For in the other corner stands the gigantic international list used in UK play, nearly half as large again, at some 277,000 words.
Many of the additional 90,000 words we in the UK are happy to permit are, in fact, North American spellings of English words – the UK game allows both “meter” and “metre” as a unit of measurement, for example. So, under ordinary circumstances, Scrabble in the UK is everything you would expect it to be – a vastly more cosmopolitan and liberal version of the North American equivalent.
Yet these are far from ordinary circumstances. For Collins, the publisher of the UK list, says it will not be updating it to include the new words until halfway through next year. Hence, if you are playing Scrabble in the UK against someone who has read today’s news and is labouring under the delusion that the Merriamwebster list is gospel, you can look forward to challenging their “bizjets” bingo right off the board. Friendships are indeed likely to fracture over such behaviour – although I am confident that the Scrabble world will emerge stronger on the other side.
The political world, though? That is going to go to hell, I’m afraid. For the true reason political summits drag on is not due to the complexity of international treaties. It is because almost all the politicians present are simultaneously playing Words With Friends with their besties back home on their phones (indeed, I know of one senior lobby journalist who keeps eight games going simultaneously, two of which are with Cabinetranked politicians).
Irritated and distracted, our politicians are liable to terrible error. How will the likes of Donald Tusk react when they discover that “facepalm” isn’t yet allowed in the international game? Will Emmanuel Macron tolerate not being allowed to play “hivemind”?
Please join me in praying for peace.