Picking a wordlist  

Will Baude is here and here arguing in favor of all those mind-bending 2 and 3 letter words in Scrabble -- or more precisely, for the more intense competition that memorizing all those little words affords. A couple thoughts about this: First of all, wasn't the scoring in Scrabble originally developed by scanning letter frequencies in the New York Times? This (questionable) methodology aside, if players nowadays frequently use words that don't appear frequently in everyday usage, doesn't that skew the letter values away from their assigned scores? The availablility of words like qat and xu really change the character of the game, and while this doesn't have to be a bad thing, it does seem strange to keep using the old scores with an expanded lexicon.

Because of my grandmother's formidable Scrabble skills, the issue of just how obscure Scrabble words should be comes up a lot in my family, and the solution most commonly/sensibly cited is that Scrabble players should have to state the definition of any word they play -- the claim being that this would return the game to its roots as a game about vocabulary. I have my doubts though that this would solve the problem, first of all because definitions to all these words do exist, and for those who have memorized them it would just involve a little more memorization -- I guess the idea is that knowing all the definitions would somehow be more virtuous? But personally I don't see any virtue in knowing some of these words (tranq, qaid?), at least outside the context of Scrabble (and Boggle).

My own problem with Scrabble and its wordlists has more to do with my distaste for established authorities like dictionaries and their apparent arbitrariness in the face of usage. If Google were a little better at differentiating words from other random strings on the internet (and maybe even in spite of this failing) I would very much want to propose a Google hit standard for Scrabble acceptability. Sure, it would open up all kinds of new problems, eg with common misspellings, but at least it would have some basis in extant linguistic reality (as opposed to the privileged arbitrartion of the standard-setters and position-holders).

MORE: Will responds to my thoughts here, but he completely misunderstands my point on Google and decentralized rulemaking. I don't have a problem with the "arbitrariness" of the decisions about Scrabble's general configuration, which I'm not even sure I see as arbitrary to begin with -- since they're pretty carefully considered for gameplay purposes, either by the person who created the game or obliquely by those who have kept playing it for so many years -- and in any case apply to nothing more harmful than a board game.

No, I was really talking about the broader issue of where standards should come from in language, and in particular how usage should figure in that equation. This is a question of enormous social and political consequence, and it's only because Scrabble incorporates language into its gameplay that it even came up here. I suggested Google as an arbitrating authority not out of some juvenile desire to make up all the rules myself, but rather because the context was a debate over usage (ie should we allow all those 2 and 3 letter words that aren't really words or never get used outside of Scrabble?) and I consider Google to be the best usage authority we have. Will might find fault with that opinion, but surely he can see a qualitative difference between making rules about Scrabble and making rules about language usage.