to Jane Ratsey Williams and George Merritt
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
1 The Game Begins
2 Opening Moves
3 How a Word Gets into the Dictionary
4 Wash Our Mouths Out with Soap
5 How I Became a Player
6 Media Time
7 The World Joins In
8 Man vs. Machine
9 The School SCRABBLE Program
10 School SCRABBLE Makes the Grade
11 SCRABBLE Hits TV
12 Going Hollywood
13 Jimmy Kimmel Spells It Out
14 Wordplay
15 Are Men Really Better than Women?
16 The End Game
17 After Words: Afterwards
ILLUSTRATIONS
APPENDIX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD
OVER THE YEARS, PEOPLE’S REACTION TO my work has always been a blend of bemusement and bewilderment.
“You may quite possibly have the most random job in the United States,” a Los Angeles Times reporter once told me.
“I bet you’re a really good speller!” at least 372 different people have remarked to their own amusement at various social gatherings.
“I hate you. And if you insist on taking words like asshole, cunt and spic out of the SCRABBLE® Dictionary, you’re going to be sorry. I know where you live, and what you look like.” This note was received from a disgruntled—and anonymous—word lover who had read a news story about the proposed “cleansing” of the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary.
“Dad, next time can you please walk behind me?” That was my thirteen-year-old daughter as we passed three boys from her class on the sidewalk in our small town. “Hi, Mr. SCRABBLE!” the boys had shouted to me.
“John, this is a business. If you want to keep doing this, you have to think more like a marketing person and less like a SCRABBLE player,” a senior Hasbro Games executive told me in a meeting.
“John Williams cares nothing about the game and tournament players. I bet he doesn’t even play SCRABBLE! He’s only in it for the money.” That was posted by a West Coast veteran tournament player on a popular gamer website. A quick check of the official tournament statistics page revealed my SCRABBLE rating was almost 200 points higher than hers!
“My wife and I have played a game of SCRABBLE every night for 47 years. I honestly think it’s keeping us alive! Thank you,” a man from Ohio wrote.
“We have to always remember that this game is bigger than all of us.” That was from my wife and business partner, Jane Ratsey Williams.
Okay. That’s what some other people have said. Now it’s my turn.
1
THE GAME BEGINS
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, my parents summoned me into the small den of our suburban home on Long Island. They sat me down opposite them and proceeded to outline a plan.
“Look, John, we all know that your sister is the smart one,” my father began as my mother nodded in agreement, “so we’ve had to make a family decision about college. Your mother and I have agreed that we have to save our money so your sister can go to a well-known, prestigious school.”
He then produced an envelope and withdrew five brochures. They were all from small, private men’s colleges, each located in the middle of nowhere in Virginia, New England, or Pennsylvania and each with a bargain-priced tuition. It was up to me to select one.
Four years later, when I was twenty, my parents followed up that earlier confidence builder with a second sit-down in the same spot. My father’s tone was pretty much the same as well.
“John, we need to be honest with each other here,” he started out. “By almost any criteria you’ve pretty much underperformed in college. For openers, you went from being a National Honor Society student at a very competitive suburban high school to a C student in college.”
My mother was not going to be left out this time. Fortified by a couple of martinis, she jumped in. “You screwed around too much. You’re completely irresponsible with money. You’re very immature.”
While I’d like to say those accusations were unfounded, the truth is they were not formed in a vacuum. So I said nothing.
“Since this is your senior year in college,” my father continued, “it’s time to discuss the best plan for you after graduation.”
My best bet, he said, was to find a large company that was willing to give me a chance. Once there, I needed to make sure that I did whatever they told me, showed up on time every day, and kept my mouth shut. “And don’t be a wise guy,” he added.
“Just follow that plan, and you’ll have no problems,” my mother urged. “Then you stay at that company for thirty or forty years. So when you’re sixty-five, they’ll take care of you until you die.”
I remember considering their advice. For about five minutes. This book is about what I did instead.
I’ll do us both a favor and bypass the early work experiences: the lemonade stand, the lawn mowing, the paper route. We’ve all done some variation of these tasks—designed to teach us the value of a dollar, project management, and other realities of working for or running an organization.
Moving forward, I need to clear up a couple of things. First, to the best of my knowledge and recollection, everything described in this book really happened over the last thirty years in the world of SCRABBLE. That said, there are a couple of disclaimers. For example, in some cases I’ve changed names or completely left them out when legally necessary.
I’ve also changed the venue in a couple of places—from a boardroom to a restaurant, from Chicago to Los Angeles, that kind of thing. That’s pretty much it. Oh yeah, I should also say that I suffer no illusions about my own role in all these stories. I have it on good authority from a disturbingly large and well-credentialed roster of people that the case could be made that at times I was overconfident, clueless, evasive, lazy, political, and dead wrong. And, of course, all the observations and opinions expressed in this book are mine only.
Mostly, though, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished and experienced. I am humbled by the people I’ve met and worked with. They include famous authors and journalists, numerous celebrities, brilliant game players, legendary word nerds, corporate CEOs, television and movie executives, my own colleagues at the National SCRABBLE Association (NSA), kids in the National School SCRABBLE Program, and so many more. All of them had critical roles in our collective mission to first revive a sagging SCRABBLE brand and then craft a plan to ensure the future of this glorious game. And I’m thankful for all the remarkable people I’ve met and worked with and the wild, random adventures this job afforded me.
I’m thankful as well for the spectacular work atmosphere I enjoyed all those years. My office was in an old sea captain’s house on the East End of Long Island, almost exactly a hundred miles from midtown Manhattan. At the height of the NSA’s activities, there were ten of us working there, the women outnumbering men two to one. Depending on the day, there were also as many as three dogs hanging around. We had a screened-in porch where we held our summer meetings and a kitchen where soup was invariably being made in the winter. The phone rang constantly; many days we fielded well over fifty calls. They ranged from people wanting us to settle a dispute over a rule or word to someone asking us to send a ninety-year-old lifelong SCRABBLE fan a birthday letter to a Hasbro executive asking for input on a new game idea.
Ironically, very little SCRABBLE was played on the premises during the workday. We were too damned busy. Among our core responsibilities:
■ Scheduling and sanctioning nearly three hundred SCRABBLE tournaments annually
■ Publishing the SCRABBLE News eight times a year
■ Maintaining the official tournament rating system
■ Coordinating up to seventy-five literacy fund-raising events annually
■ Working with publisher Merriam-Webster on updating the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary
■ Reviewing SCRABBLE book manuscripts and new product ideas for Hasbro
■ Searching the media and Internet for SCRABBLE knock-offs and trademark violations
■ Overseeing the National School SCRABBLE Program and doing outreach to schools, parks and recreation departments, educational conventions, libraries, and more
■ Organizing and promoting the National SCRABBLE Championship, the National School SCRABBLE Championship, and the World SCRABBLE Championship
■ Serving as technical advisers when SCRABBLE was used in a film, television show, or commercial
2
OPENING MOVES
I KNEW VIRTUALLY NOTHING ABOUT SCRABBLE WHEN I began this adventure. I did come from a family of word and game lovers, but my gaming pursuits at the time were poker, crossword puzzles, trivia, and backgammon.
When I say I come from a family of word lovers, I should confess that we came from the darker side of the word world: grammar. Yes, grammar, that purist pursuit that engenders, if not outright encourages, endearing personal qualities such as self-righteousness, pedantry, and a sense of superiority. In our household, should any family member misuse or mispronounce a word, he or she could pretty much count on the correct usage being shouted out instantaneously, often by more than one other person. Forty years after the incident, my family still chuckles smugly about the time my uncle Richard blurted out the word IRREGARDLESS when telling a story. Clearly, he had mistakenly blended REGARDLESS with IRRESPECTIVE. Still, he was hooted out of the room, bolting in a flustered huff. Sadly, Uncle Richard did not live to see that IRREGARDLESS is now included in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.
It’s important for those of us in the Grammar Police to examine our motivation:
■ Is it to make the world a better-communicating and more ear-pleasing place?
■ Is it to help a friend or loved one avoid an embarrassing grammar situation in the future?
■ Is it simply to satisfy our own need to be right?
■ Is it a means to show someone up—a boss, an enemy—by making ourselves look smarter?
Only you and your conscience know your true motivation. However, the Grammar Police in my family defused any negative accusations by employing this mantra: it’s not about being right, it’s about being accurate.
Ultimately, this topic raises the question of what to do in daily conversation when confronted with an appalling misuse or mispronunciation of a word or phrase. The more tolerant of us will simply shrug it off—perhaps silently and complacently noting the transgression—and move on. Others, with a fervent commitment to pristine language and, perhaps, a dark personal need, have a number of options.
One is correctly using the mangled word or phrase a bit later in the same conversation. Let’s say your neighbor uses the word BANAL while telling a story, mispronouncing it as “bay-nul” as opposed to the preferred “buh-nal.”
After wincing, you allow the story to continue. Then, after the topic has moved on, you find a way to use the word yourself later on in the conversation, pronouncing it correctly. At that point, you’ve done all you can. The onus is on your neighbor to recognize the transgression.
Option two: just flat-out call the offender on it. As I said, my family would simply shout out the correct usage or pronunciation in the culprit’s face, a gleeful Greek chorus of the self-righteous. There is, however, a tamer and arguably more practical and sensitive approach than that brutal tactic. I confess to employing it exactly once in my life.
A colleague of mine, well educated and highly successful in business, was telling a story about attending a very high-profile, black-tie charity affair. A modest guy, he remarked about his fascination and slight discomfort at “being there hobnobbing with all the HOI POLLOI.”
I immediately knew his intended meaning: that he was among the upper class. Sadly, the actual meaning is the complete opposite, and I was dismayed—for him—by his unfortunate choice of phrase. Of course, we are all guilty of sprinkling our conversations with the occasional foreign phrase, right? It’s an efficient and time-tested technique to subtly display our intellect and sophistication. Or so we’d like to think.
My sense was that he might have been thinking of “HOITY-TOITY,” a similar-sounding phrase with a slightly foreign tinge. It has a secondary meaning of “highfalutin.” Regardless, something possessed me to stop my friend dead in his tracks with this question.
“Excuse me, Max, but if you were misusing a word in conversation, would you want me to tell you?” When I told another word-loving friend about this later, he eloquently replied, “Dude, how the fuck is he supposed to answer that question!” He maintained that my approach could be classified as nonviolent social aggression.
At any rate, Max allowed that of course he’d want to know if he was misusing a word. I was even certain I detected a sliver of gratitude in his reply. Before I corrected him, I explained that I myself am the kind of person who would definitely want to know as opposed to going through the rest of my life unwittingly offending language sticklers—and looking stupid. Later, I decided upon reflection that this approach was both impractical and socially dangerous. That left me with no choice but to consider the third option: the anonymous letter.
While this option may seem a bit of overkill and of dubious character, it is effective. I hasten to add that I’ve never actually employed this tactic. However, an example might be along these lines.
While this option may
Dear Brenda:
You are one of the smartest and most wonderful people I know, and I treasure our relationship. However, I need to write to you about an important matter that’s been going on for some time. There’s no easy way to tell you this, but I’ve noticed a number of times that you’ve been misusing the words LIE, LAY, and LAIN and I feel compelled to call it to your attention. Please know that, according to experts, these are among the most misused words in the English language. So don’t beat yourself up too much! I just thought you’d want to know.
Sincerely,
A friend
The benefit here is twofold. First, you’ve successfully removed one more instance of incorrect word usage from the atmosphere. Second, you’ve helped a friend—whether it was asked for or not.
In addition to my family’s word and grammar vigilance, my early life was subject to an authority of an even higher order—the Roman Catholic Church. This dynamic operated on two levels. First, the traditional English curriculum—taught at my all-boys school by grim, presumably celibate monks—was disproportionately devoted to language, vocabulary, and reading. To this day, should a syntax emergency arise, I could effectively diagram a sentence to avert a disaster. At least I like to think so.
I remember one time, in fifth grade, being whipped with the knotted rope belt worn around a monk’s waist for a reading mistake. I was standing in front of a class of fifty boys, reading aloud a passage about Monaco. I kept saying “prince-abil-ity” instead of “princ-ipal-ity.” Six times I mispronounced the word, and six times the rope lashed the back of my thighs. Finally, I was sent to my seat in shame. The monk immediately called up another boy, who promptly read it correctly, punctuating it with a gloating smirk in my direction.
I got off easy. A year later, a teacher hung one of my classmates out a third-story window by his ankles for using the word “ain’t.”
But the church did contribute to my word nerdom in other ways. For example, I was an altar boy. This meant t
hat as a ten-year-old I had to learn hundreds of words and phrases in Latin in order to serve Mass. Understandably, this contributed to a lifelong curiosity about words. Later, four years of Latin in high school helped me understand the value of Latin roots as well. It also developed an ability to memorize hundreds of words that served no purpose whatsoever in the real world—a very useful skill for SCRABBLE players. The reality is that no one is going to go very far in the world of tournament SCRABBLE who isn’t willing to commit to memory obscure but tile-valuable words.
Here’s an example of such a word: UMIAQ. Every tournament SCRABBLE player knows UMIAQ. It means “an Eskimo canoe” and is also spelled with a K: UMIAK. It’s of interest because it is one of just three words in the English language that has a Q and U that are not connected. The others are QIVIUT, which means “the wool of a musk-ox,” and BURQA, an alternative spelling of BURKA. Pretty obscure stuff, huh? Yet one day, many summers ago, I received an excited telephone call from my friend and frequent SCRABBLE opponent Herb Scannell, who at the time was president of Nickelodeon. He had just returned from a vacation to Iceland. His excitement was palpable through the long-distance connection.
“You’ll never guess what I just saw on my trip!” Herb gushed. “I was leaving the airport in Greenland. About a mile outside of the exit, I spotted a sign nailed to a tree. In big letters, it said ‘Umiaq for Rent’!”
“No shit! You’re kidding me!” I was excited as he. This was a word nerd’s version of people seeing the image of the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast or a tree stump. Only after he hung up did I realize that I’d forgotten to ask whether it was the UMIAQ or UMIAK spelling. In the spirit of full disclosure—and to head off angry letters and calls—I should mention that UMIAQ has additional alternative spellings. Among them are OOMIAC and OOMIACK.
■ ■ ■
It’s probably the single question I’ve been asked the most over the last twenty-five years. “So how does one get to be the executive director of the National SCRABBLE Association?” Of course, the subtext to that question is often “Why you?”
Word Nerd: Dispatches From the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground Page 1