Official Scrabble loses to Collins Scramble Allwords

Games for a child

I think I have been playing Scrabble for about 32 years, my uncle has just returned from the UK and he brought us a few board games, Scrabble and Monopoly.

Thankfully, I lived in a home where my parents had a sense of fun, whilst my mother sometimes wanted me to revise my schoolwork, what I learnt in class was enough to get me a good examination result – I am glad they exhibited a keen interest in a lively childhood than many typical Nigerian parents afforded their children.

I do remember that my mother spent her salary raise given in the Udoji review on buying my first bicycle.

The Scrabble lifestyle

In any case, Scrabble became the social ice-breaker, you made friends through battles on the board, in school competitions you won prizes and even played for money.

I am sorry to say, it was not designed for the dyslexic, you had to be able to spell right and if you didn’t, you hoped that your opponent(s) were unaware and you took away the spoils with high scores.

Obscure words, smart placings, multiple words on premium squares and everyone wanted to take you on to serve you a whopping defeat only for you to triumph.

The rules are clear, some house rules too like – timed turns, tiles placed on board must form part of the word for that turn, reusable blanks – anything to give the game a bit of excitement.

The matured player always played within the extents of the dictionary used to adjudge the words spelt out on board, in many cases it was the Chambers’ Twentieth Century English dictionary until we got hold of the Original Scrabble Words where two-letter word plays might just have you storming off in a tirade of four-letter expletives with the confirmation of the four-letter word – lost – as your gift.

No rules for fools

Rules are there for a purpose, any game without rules is a riot, a barbarian’s orgy, a lascivious bounty of reckless abandon to which there can be no restraint.

The news today [1] should have arrived 5 days earlier on April the first when Mattel the copyright holder of Scrabble announced a rules change which was not tactical or functional but just a typical lapse to invite stupidity into the pretence of being erudite, to "introduce an element of popular culture into the game", they said with vacuous glee.

Proper nouns would be allowed – this would include names of places, people, companies or brands – whilst it is not a free for all since it would be restricted to a Collins dictionary word list; woe betide the place, person, company or brand who has not seen the business and competitive opportunity of being able to brag about being a new Scrabble word.

Brand your game

Honestly, that rule change creates another game that could better be distinguished as Scramble as the fashion victims with their trousers halfway down their legs jive with Burberry as chavs, drinking Courvoisier with their LV caps and Gucci teeth wearing a mix-and-match of Crocs on one foot and Jimmy Choo’s on the other – all legitimate words of Scramble.

Only Scramble can best describe this change as a sense of chaos, disorder, the lack of rules and a riot of meaningless jumbles of letter arrangements that would be comfortable in, well, the game Scramble.

To call this game Scrabble would be sacrilegious to the extreme, tantamount to having the players of a typical game of football carry the ball with hands into the net and being able to score in any net for your team – ditch the goalkeepers, they are useless.

Maybe chess might also consider a rule chance, pawns can move in any direction regardless of where they are on the board and the king does no have to bother about being in check.

There is a wisdom that followed the time-honoured rules of Scrabble, just as constutions do not get changed on a whim – those rules have stood the test of time.

Just imagine how cross I would be because my village Ijesha-Ijebu does not appear in Collins Scramble Allwords and Walsall where I was born does, the hyphen is immaterial was we flip the board in unsettled dispute and depart in disgust.

Your name is not in the book of …

There might be the case for discrimination for including certain names and not others because they are Anglophile but Sinophile, Arabic, Asian or African names receive no prominence in the new hegemony of games, gamesmanship and an incipient preponderance of inferiority over those not blessed to be counted amongst the chosen,

No book will be big enough to contain all legitimate names in the whole wide world just because some smart chap thought that was a market for idiots to play Scrabble rather than their consoles.

For once, I wish I were a lawyer; I would be at the forefront of a class action suit and sue the pants off Mattel for this inane insight of faddism that leaves a majority of the global community that is their market place out of the exclusive Collins Scramble Allwords – Oh! Deliver us from this travesty.

I will be back on the matter, I am not finished yet.

* Since Scramble seems to be taken, a synonym might well do like scamper, scuffle or scurry but NOT Scrabble.

Source

[1] BBC News - Proper nouns come into play in Scrabble rule change

I hate being a pawn

An unwilling pawn

I did not see this coming, I thought I was an important piece on a chess-board only to find out that I am being played like a pawn about to be taken off the board en passant.

I had been looking forward to my new role which we were about to flesh out in the month of January before it starts on the first working day of February.

The promise or what I thought it offered was an opportunity to move out from under the project management that had stifled my objectives with inertia, lack of vision, incompetence, self-preservation and cack-handedness.

I was to lead this group until I had a meeting on Thursday with the project manager who probably does not know that he is the main reason why I refused to take up a permanent contract in July and put in my notice in October.

Outsmarted

Somehow, as we were realigning the focus and developing aims for the new team, I should have sensed that the interest and involvement of the project manager was a manoeuvre for new relevance at my expense.

The director I thought I would be reporting to had offered the leadership of the team to the project manager whilst I was on holiday and I was to assume a consultancy role.

Errr! I do not think that is what I had in mind at all, it would not work because I do not expect a Damascene conversion to dynamism to help me achieve what I hoped to achieve.

My marketing literature is really now on the market, it would appear, January the thirty-first is my last day here after 17 months.

I hate being a pawn and if I should be a pawn I should a significant one on the board, ready to capture a helpless principal piece or be promoted to a principal piece. I am off this chess board, I need to be in another game.

Rules of the manager's chess game

A day to cherish

I had to make a few phone calls this morning to sort out a number of financial matters.

Then I had to deal with the unseemly nature of using an umbrella as a cane especially in such fine weather.

So, it was a beeline to The English Hatter for an ivory tipped cane of the best quality; a gentleman in times when it mattered who you were always was fitly dressed with hat and cane – it is the 21^st Century, I think it is just the right thing to do.

Then it was the main English bookstore in Amsterdam for a copy of Tom Peters' Re-imagine. Tom Peters is probably one of the most innovative management authorities of this generation.

He gets you thinking everywhere but in the box; are we not always boxed up in the circumstances we find ourselves, most especially at work.

Petty Tyrants

In reading just the foreword, I could begin to see a world to which I am quite familiar with his initial rant.

"People … in enterprise, in government … are by and large well intentioned. They'd like to get things done. To be of service to others. But they are thwarted … at every step of the way … by absurd organisational barriers … and by the egos of petty tyrants (be they corporate middle managers, or army colonels, or school superintendents).

Even I could not have been that articulate.

Sometime ago I had to tell someone I was at work to do my job rather than just cover my arse; but that in the process of really doing my job I might as well have covered my arse.

Taking liberties of praise

Finger-pointing and accolade hunting are rife within the melee of managers of circumstance rather than merit; appointing ambitious props who being jobs worthies are so far up the management backside, we need a new term for sycophancy.

At one time we hoped we were just pawns in the grand game of corporate chess politics where you shout and are unheard because your boss whilst sitting on you has made it impossible for you to take in air.

But in this new rules chess game, a principal piece gets converted into a pawn on capturing an opponent's chess piece and the King gains an additional power move; first as a bishop, then a knight and then a rook, by which time it moves like a queen, can never be checked and the best you can hope for a bizarre stalemate.

Bad management expertise

As for the original pawns; mindless and monotonous, ball-less minions who know nothing of their professional function than to frustrate everyone else in the team; on the premise that the ability to annoy is management expertise.

Having attended every possible management course they have not learnt that leadership includes an expression of personality which they are not genetically disposed to.

Pen-pushers on acid offered responsibilities that have to be shouldered by more conscientious personnel who are in danger of being besmirched because of the error of managerial judgment.

My friends, this has hardly begun to explain the situation we endure from 9 to 5 in the quest for a pay packet and credibility.

I am an optimist; we belong to the gene pool that is in ascendancy. The day of reckoning cometh, I just cannot wait.