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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

How do you write about a new kind of Scrabble and score big?

Just feast your eyes on this brilliant opening by David Montgomery in The Washington Post:
Tuesday dawned with sputtering Scrabble fans dashing for their dictionaries: Appall! (10 points). Pox! (12 points). Crazy! (19 points). Zounds! (16 points).

By day's end, they felt better: Phew. (12 points). Sheesh. (12 points). They wished they had enough tiles in their racks to spell "apocrypha" or "exaggerate."

Stefan Fatsis, a Washington-based Scrabble coach and devoted chronicler of the Scrabble world, summed up the snafu (8 points) this way: "It's a case of corporate flackery and media incompetence completely misleading the public."

What caused about 10,000 near-heart attacks from London to El Segundo, Calif., began a few days ago with a tiny item in a British trade paper. It referred to Mattel's plans to introduce a new kind of Scrabble that would permit the use of proper nouns.

Read the full article here.
  • Photo courtesy: The Washington Post
  • Thanks to Pradeep Reddy for the tip-off

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