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Scrabble-playing Fool

Ekrem sent me email today with a link to an xkcd comic:



This comic reminded him of me, presumably not only because I'm a Scrabble nut (to the point where I have memorized all the legal two-letter words, but not yet to the point where I have memorized all the three-letter words), but also because my sense of humor tends to the Andy Kaufman-esque style of challenging propriety in conversation and other social interactions. I would be playing CLITORIS with great alacrity.

The comic has an additional clever bit in that if you mouse over the image on the xkcd web page, it delivers an additional note: "A veteran Scrabble player will spot the OSTRICH option." This is true, but while CLITORIS would score 64 points (including the double-letter scores and the bonus for playing all the tiles), OSTRICH would score a measly 10 points. That's unacceptable to a veteran Scrabble player.

Thankfully, our suffering protagonist actually has two other options that garner the 50-point bonus for playing all seven tiles: TROCHILS through the H, or COISTRIL through the I. (A trochil, of course, is the bird that cleans an alligator's teeth, while a coistril is a young lad employed by the esquire to carry the knight's heavy equipment around.) That's the way to score lots of points while avoiding embarrassment.

I'm guessing, however, that more people know what an ostrich is than a trochil or a coistril. The xkcd writer could still have engineered the joke so that while CLITORIS is the obvious play, a little more searching reveals another common 8-letter word. For example, if the board contained the word NOISE instead of HI, the same rack would produce CLOISTER and COLORIST in addition to CLITORIS. Of course, that might dilute the humor a bit for the sake of an arcane easter egg, but if xkcd wants to pander to the true Scrabble nuts, he should be more careful.

Comments

  1. J-W Maessen12:50 PM

    Wait, you can't post a reference to the Wikipedia page for xkcd! That's just wrong.

    -Jan
    [Who can't spell urls today]

    ReplyDelete
  2. J. Michael Andresen1:43 PM

    I was going to include the link back to the xkcd page, but for some reason I noticed at the last minute that the image itself was a hyperlink, and I though that it would direct back to that page. It was only then that I included the Wikipedia page, too. I have since dicscovered that the image links to the xkcd website, but only to the image itself there and not the home page. Thanks for correcting my deficiency!

    ReplyDelete

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