My next date and I had planned to go on a picnic but the weather took a turn for the worse. Instead we ended up at her place with a wet blanket and a soggy baguette. She said she considered herself something of a wordsmith and challenged me to a game of Scrabble. I told her to watch herself because Cowboy is a cunning linguist.
Things didn’t start off so well. She schooled me by getting a triple word score with suq. I challenged it, even as I’m writing this it gets underlined by spellcheck. She had the page dog-earred in her scrabble dictionary. An alternative spelling of souk: a marketplace in Northern Africa or the Middle East. Hey, the spellchecker also underlines souk. I’m thinking Microsoft and Hasbro should meet and get their facts straight.
I stopped staring at her rack for a while to stare at my own. Ah, the near sexual excitement of having a perfect move lined up. I had the letters T-H-E-S-E, so I added them to the end of suq. I was hoping to get both a triple word score and some hot oral action. Instead I got a lecture on proper scrabble etiquette.
Things went downhill from there. She had J, X and Z along with her Q. I had only vowels. She wouldn’t accept AEIOU as a word. She wasn’t just winning, she was making sure I knew it. Every time her score went up, she’d point at me and yell “In your face, loser boy!” Now I like getting spanked, but only in the bedroom. Finally I drew a B and added it on to her itch. The game was over, but so was the date.
January 9, 2008 04:28 PM
Man, I always fail at Scrabble too.
But then again, it's tough if you haven't memorized the strange anomalies in Scrabble dictionaries; the things you can get away with spelling...