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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

2-letter Scrabble words are more offensive than curse words, and anyone who insists on them deserves only two: "F" and "U".

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Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.

I'd guess en passant is more surprising to neophytes than castling

At a guess check-mate is the most surprising to neophytes. It gets them every time no matter how often it happens.

Huh? If checkmate is confusing you can just play until you take the opponent's king, with minimal difference to the game.

I had never even heard of that (although I'm by no means an avid chess player). I think I'll have a hard time convincing my friends that's a real rule.

The Wikipedia article is good at explaining the rationale. According to it, it was added around the time the two-space opening move for a pawn was added to balance the game.

Oddly, though Wikipedia deletes programming languages like Factor due to non-notability[1], editors get to go nuts on everything chess or Star Trek without recourse. If you want to know more about why things in chess are the way they are, Wikipedia is your pal.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Factor_(programming_langua...

wow, that factor notability discussion was a depressing read.

I've had people shout at me about making up rules after capturing en passant.

That, and stalemate ("what do you mean, a tie? You can't move, so you lose!"), but that is a rarer occurrence, as it requires the neophyte to be on the winning side (he won't complain if he is the one without a legal move, and you announce it a tie)

Yeah, I was actually going to use en passant, but I figured more people would understand the comment if I used castling.

They're both outside the norm enough. I remember the first time en passant was used on me (4th or 5th grade?), I thought it was made up.

If you want to start an argument, stop someone from castling through check.

Good analogy, actually. There is a popular perception that being good at chess indicates skill at strategy or reasoning. In reality, these are helpful, yes, but mostly what it indicates is that you know a lot about the game of chess. Similarly, there is a perception that skill at Scrabble indicates a large English vocabulary.

It's reasonable for someone with good reasoning or a large vocabulary to find it distasteful that they lose consistently simply because they haven't memorized the 1,000 most common moves.[0] In chess, this is pretty much built into the mechanics of the game, but it's easy to fix in Scrabble with a simple house rule: Don't use bullshit words.

It's only part of the game if you let it be.

[0] I'll give an illustrative example. The official Scrabble dictionary[1] lists "re" with the definition "the second tone of the diatonic musical scale". Just so for the other sounds of diatonic solfeggio that everyone knows: re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. All of these, according to Hasbro, are English words, with plurals.

We're all descriptivists here, that's fine. But did you ever wonder why there are only seven words for the diatonic scale, but actually twelve tones in an octave? Or why re, mi, and fa have different vowel sounds? The answer is that solfege has a way to verbalize accidentals (notes not in the key) or non-diatonic scales by modulating the vowel sound. A raised do is a di; a lowered re is a ra. So you can easily pronounce a chromatic scale beginning at do: do, di/ra, re, ri/me, mi, fa, fi/se, sol, si/le, la, li/te, ti, do. (The syllable used depends on the key.)

Go ahead, look up any of those accidental syllables in the dictionary. La and le: Both French articles, both solfeggio syllables. Only one is a Scrabble word. You can't say that's not stupid.

[1] http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/search.cfm

You've just moved the line of argumentation: instead of "is the word in the dictionary we're using", it's "is that word a bullshit word" -- but only one of those questions is answerable definitively. The only way to play without argument is to use a dictionary, at which point you might as well use the standard one.

(Like another poster in this thread, I do also play friendly games with an open two-letter-word list, to level the playing field for people who don't care to memorize trivia.)

I gave the example to illustrate what I mean by "bullshit word", but the question is more or less this: Are you using this word because it's a word you know, or because it's a word you found in a list of Scrabble words?

I'm not saying that the idea of a canonical word list doesn't make game-mechanical sense, just that it turns Scrabble from a word game into a list of symbols game in a way that seems stupid to me.

It's not meant to be more than an intuitive house rule to encourage people to play with "real" words.

It's a demonstration that scrabble's dictionary uses completely arbitrary and unpredictable methods to choose which bullshit words it has. It can't even use the excuse it's trying to be 'complete'.

It's a little different than chess. Chess rules can be laid out in a few thousand words, including castling.

Right off the bat, you need to pick a set of words that are allowed. Tournaments play, of course, allow a small set of those odd two letter words. However, both sides have to agree on a word set up front. it's perfectly reasonable to pick a dictionary that doesn't recognize "za" as a real word for pizza. However, i think if transfire really wants to use "fu", he'd have to resort to urban dictionary for the word list. That also admits za, so it's kind of a lose lose there.

As a house rule (since none of us have any plans to ever competitively play Scrabble), the list of all legal two-letter words which came in our "deluxe Scrabble" instruction manual is available to all players at all times.

It has really helped cut down on the number of games where we get stuck or frustrated because there's "nowhere to move", both by making more moves legal, and helping us keep the board configuration more compact, while at the same time eliminating what we see as trivia (what 2-letter words are legal) vs. "regular English" in the games we play.

one of the world's largest tournaments, the annual king's cup tournament in bangkok, actually supplies 2, 3 and selected 4 letter word cheat sheets to all the players, to compensate for the fact that thai players use the north american rather than the world dictionary.

Aside; It's funny: I never though anyone actually used the word "za" seriously (for "pizza") until I saw it used in an episode of "The Office." When we saw that, my wife and I burst out laughing. Now we use it all the time ironically. In any event, I love the two letter words. For me, they give the game strategic depth.

I would imagine one of the writers of The Office is a Scrabble player - this timing is a bit too coincidental.

'za' was added in OSPD4, which was published in June 2005: http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/pr/2005-scrabble-diction...

Michael suggests ordering some za in Season 2 Episode 13 (The Secret) which aired in January 2006.

Been playing Scrabble casually for about a year, and I've found two letter words are where you get the most points. If there's a vowel beside a triple letter, often you can stick an X on there and get it 6 times. And X's have a ton of two letter words, at least in the dictionary I've been using. So maybe they're "offensive", but they seem to be a great way to score points.

That's what makes them so offensive. If you just got a tiny advantage from these obscure words it would be fine, but with the tournament scrabble ruleset, any player with higher strategic skill but who hasn't bothered to rote-memorize the wordlists will lose. Which makes it an unfun game.

"ap"; noun: An illegal two-letter word in Scrabble. E.g., "Hey, you can't play 'qk'; that's an ap!"

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