The Scribble on Scrabble

Scrabble is a game that neither of us plays with regularity. And maybe that's good for this episode. We're all learning, right?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
should Know, good old fashioned pop culture games edition. Yeah
and yeah, here we are finally talking about scrabble. I've
been asking for you to do this with me for

(00:31):
at least a decade, and you kept refusing. I still
don't know why. Even Jerry chimed in and was like,
will you guys please do scrabble, and finally you relented.
I think just because you wanted me and Jerry to
stop bothering you about it.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
No, it's probably it. A big thanks to Laura for
her help on this one.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
What was your nickname for her?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Doctor Claw?

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Doctor Claw? Do you play scrabble? Are you a scrabbler?
I just kind of wanted to get that out of
the way.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
You know, I wish I were. I'm not, And it's
not like I have an aversion to it or anything
like that. It's just not part of my world. I guess,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Yeah, same, I mean we own it, and I have
played scrabble here and there. If somebody's like, hey, let's
play scrabble. I won't go like, no, sorry, I'm not
going to do it right, but you know, I'll play
very occasionally, but I've never been a regular scrabbler, nor
am I very good at it at all, especially if
I'm playing against somebody who you know, because there's a

(01:29):
lot more to it than just like knowing words.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Well, I feel like based on stuff you should know history.
Our best episodes are ones where we explain games that
we don't actually play. Soccer, chess, yeah, I mean the
list just keeps going on. It feels like we're about
to add to it.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, surfing, yes, surfing. I mean we should probably just
say that scrabble if you don't know, it's a board
game in which two to four players use letters little
tiles to spell out words on a board and a
crossword fashion.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Wow, that was a good description.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
In other words, you know, the words have to intersect
each other. You can't just throw a random word out
there in the corner if you feel like it. They
have to touch and use a letter or I guess
a blank space for another word.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
And by the way, I just want to go ahead,
and because scrabble people are probably going to get mad
at us. But I'm going to go ahead and throw
a suggestive rule change. Okay, that there is a word scrabble,
and that means to as a verb, to scratch or grope,
to try and collect something, or as a now in
the act of doing that. And I propose that if

(02:39):
you play that eight letter word, that not only do
you get your bingo bonus for playing a seven letter word,
I think you should if you play the word scrabble,
you should get an extra bonus on.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Top of it of how many points million.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Whatever's fair. That's where I just step back and say,
you guys, handle it.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Okay, you like to kick the hornet's nest and then
watch them go.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
I just think I don't know, if you play the
word scrab I will give it a little, just a
little bump.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I agree. I think you're right right.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
That's my only suggestion, my only note.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
A little more about it. The scrabble board is fifteen
by fifteen squares twenty five two hundred and twenty five
total squares. And because it's fifteen by fifteen, you're limited
to no more than fifteen letter words.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Sure, and.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
I guess just a quick summary of the rules so
when you play that first word, you have to play
it in the center square. That's where you start, and
you can build off of other people's words. You get
up to fifteen letter words by building onto other words,
because you could never spell more than a seven letter word,
because at no point in time do you ever have

(03:44):
more than seven tiles.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Right, And as I said that seven tiles played it
once is called the bingo. You add up your score
at the end and tack on fifty points at that point, right,
or however many you get. Apparently experts can play like,
you know, three, four or five of those in a
game sometimes.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, oh yeah, that's a great way to run up
scores from what I can tell. And then across the
board there's triple word scores, double word scores, double letter scores,
and triple letter scores. And basically when you lay a
tile over that, depending on whether it's a letter or
a word, you get bonus points for it. So when
you're like, like, if you play a bingo across like

(04:27):
a triple word score cooking, you got a bunch of points.
You basically just dusted your opponent in that one move.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
Essentially, Yeah, I mean, if you're just sort of amateur
funzies scrabble people, one big bingo like that can seal
the game for you.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, I'm called sending a packing with tears in their eyes.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
I think in France, by the way, the bingo is
called a scrabble just other nuts and bolts. You know.
The tiles come in a little their little wooden tiles,
little wooden square tiles, and on the tile is a
letter and then a point value sort of as a
sub script. And then you keep your letters on a
little wooden tile rack. And ideally your opponent does not

(05:08):
see those like you know, it's they're facing away from
you if you're opposite your opponent. And that's a big
part of like an expert, or at least an accomplished
or experienced scrabbleist is dummies like me and I guess you.
If you and I played, we just sit down and
try and spilt fart every chance we got. If you're

(05:30):
an experienced scrabblist, you're almost like counting cards, like you
know how many letters are in the bag of like
how many of each letter in the bag, and you
see them being played, you know how many are on
your rack? You know how many are still in the pile,
so you're sort of trying to figure out mathematical possibilities
of what's still out there and what can be played,
Like that's the next level stuff.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, for sure. And it's not like evenly distributed. For example,
there's twelve e's, but there's only one J, K, Q,
X and Z, and then the other letters there is
kind of distributed in weird random ways, so that like
you could, I guess easily count that stuff. If you
play scrabble enough, you're just going to pick up on

(06:10):
how many are out there at any given point.

Speaker 3 (06:14):
Yeah, you've also got your blank tiles, which are worth
zero points, but that those really help out in making
words possible that you couldn't get ordinarily m hmm. And
then you've got your one pointers A E, I, L, N, O,
R S T and you.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
And also just real quick, I did some poking around, Chuck,
and I found that there's some mnemonic devices that like
tournament level players use to remember how many points a
particular letter gets.

Speaker 3 (06:44):
You should say that after I list them all.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Well, I was I was going to just do it
by by group, if that's okay with you. Sure, So
the first group one point they use astronauts eat in limbo. No, right,
silly tiger umbrella.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
All right. The two pointers are DNG, Dave and Gary. Okay,
I would say dog gone. Three points are BCM and
p H.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
That is be chewing and masticating pizza.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Does someone really suggests like, hey, use these and don't.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Make up your own No, I'm making this up.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
I gotcha. This is all a bit. Okay, four points
we got fh VNW and why right?

Speaker 2 (07:31):
So for Heaven's vake? Why you Okay?

Speaker 3 (07:36):
I get it now. You should have told me this
is a bit. Five pointers, you get your k okay, okay, eight.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Pointers jn X Jackson loves and.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
X okay Jackson loves.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Yeah, you just have to ignore the the l okay.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Then your ten pointer Josh, what are you gonna end
up with?

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Q and Z quarts and quartz?

Speaker 3 (08:05):
That's great? I think I got it.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
You got it?

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, give me a quiz in the end. I'll put
this away and then you can just quizz me.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah. Once you learn that, you'll never forget it.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
There is a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon Andrew Thomas,
who says, if you go first, you have an advantage
of fourteen points. If you have that blank tile. Ever
in the game, that's an advantage of thirty points if
you're good at scrabble, not like me.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Right, there's also like, if you have S tiles, there's
a ten point advantage. And the reason why I was
like that doesn't make any sense because S, as you
remember from your mnemonic device, is only a one point tile.
You should throw that on the end though, right, Yeah,
that's the thing. So like if you add if you,
like I said, you can add on to other words
that are already on the board, even once another player

(08:54):
wrote out and whatever word score they got for that word,
if you add an S, you get that same word
score plus one point for the ass. So that's a
really easy way to rack up some quick points and
totally I think also probably annoy other players.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
I wonder about that. I'd like to hear from from scrabblers.
I mean, if it's fair game, it's fair game.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yes, and there's but there's plenty of rules that are
fair game that are also like you're a jackass.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, that's a good point. Let me see here, what
else do we have? We have X and Z give
you a three to five point advantage even though they're
you know, tougher to use, and the Q is a
five point disadvantage because I mean, I was about to say,
you always have to have that U. But I'm sure
there are weird scrabble words that don't have a QU.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
There's two that I know of.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
One is key qi. Yeah, I think I heard of
uy or.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
No, sorry, that's chi life force. I think, okay, and
you get eleven points for that one, and then I
can't remember. There's one more that's like a Q word
that doesn't not require a U. Oh.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
No, Qi is in here because that's the highest scoring
two letter word along with za. Is that what you said?

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, and I looked up za za Yeah, and it's
slang for pizza. I'm not certain that that usage is allowed.
But it's also an archaic word for a B flat notation. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
I wonder if because I did the same thing you
did every time they gave it a Laura found an
example of a word that's unusual or high scoring. I
always looked it up because I was curious. I wonder
if that's part of the love of scrabble, is actually
learning what these words mean or they're like I really
don't care. I just care how much it's worth.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Well, from what I can tell, scrabble players don't care
what a word means. They don't think of them like that.
And I mean they'll come up later with those controversial words.
Oh sure, yeah, point, Yeah, it's just us. We're curious types.
Grabble players are not.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
That's that's true. The highest scoring three letter word is
Zach's nineteen pointer, and zek is sixteen is a four
letter word worth the most at twenty two.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
That means like a test of sorts.

Speaker 3 (11:05):
Okay, and then zippy what does that mean?

Speaker 2 (11:07):
The pinhead?

Speaker 3 (11:09):
Zippy the pinhead? What's that?

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Oh, it's a really weird eighties comic strip, you know,
the clown with the Zippy the pinhead.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
No, I don't know it.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
You should look it up. It's it's weird. It's a
weird comic strip.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Okay, I don't know it.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
But it couldn't be that.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Sorry, I have to correct myself before all of the
scrabble players email in. It couldn't be Zippy the pinhead
because Zippy the pinhead would be a proper noun.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Ah. Okay, good point. Things you can't use proper nouns.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
No, you can't.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
Might as well go ahead and say.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
That they're really serious about that stuff too.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
No, I bet. See, I'm a house rules guy, so
I can you know, as long as everyone's on board,
I think you can. You can have your own house
rules first. Oh, I agree, don't bring that into a tournament.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
No, get that mess out of here, is what they'll
tell you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
But like if I were to play with Ruby, she'd
and I'd probably say like, hey, we can use propernouns
because she'll want to put our dog's name or something,
or maybe I would, right. I did look up the
highest scoring bingo, and that is musjiks m u z
j i k s, which is a Russian peasant. Wow,

(12:20):
well that's probably it's probably Moujiku's or something.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, I like it both ways, though musjis. Look at
all the muzzjiks toiling in the fields.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, I like that.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
So I was confused because there's a lot of like
one of the rules is no proper nouns, no words
that end an apostrophe or require an apostrophe. Yeah, and
then also no foreign words. But clearly some foreign words
are allowed in because they're so common in English that
they've just basically been adopted into the language. I get that,

(12:54):
but a musjis is not a common word in English,
so it must mean that that does appear in some
English dictionary somewhere, because that's kind of the great ruler arbiter.
But I just don't see how it could be. That's
just weird to me.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
Well, what's weird is your college band I know for
a fact was Jake Clark and the Muschicks.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yes, but we were trying to be exotic, you know.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
And we should also say that scrabble, I think, is
now up to thirty languages all over the world, and
apparently that can be problematic, like in France you can
add an e and an S to many many words,
so it can kind of get out of hand with
the score totals. There. And our beloved Germany, and I
never really thought about this, but German words are long,

(13:40):
so there's not a lot of I mean, they're sure. Sure,
there are obviously words shorter than seven words in Germany,
but a lot less than a lot of other languages.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, it's true, So it must.

Speaker 3 (13:50):
Just be Bingo City or whatever Bingo city is in German.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
There's also Bingo. I don't know what city, Bingo b Shot,
maybe Bingo Stock. Sure, there's a so in some other
countries too. In foreign language versions of Scrabble, there are
some adjustments with the tiles, like some have more than

(14:14):
one hundred tiles.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
Oh right, because of weird little letters.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, there's like double L and double R. In the
Spanish language version. There's also the N with the till
day over it that that's also a tile. Yeah, I
think that's worth eight points. Nice, Yeah, but you have
to to remember that that's eight points. You have to say. Nice.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Right. Should we take a break? I like how this
is headed.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, all right, we'll be right back.

Speaker 3 (14:41):
I want to learn about a terror sort of college dactyl,
how to take an that's a little.

Speaker 1 (14:55):
Word up, Jerry.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
All right, we're back. And if you're gonna talk about scrabble,
you got to talk about Alfred Mosher Butts because he
is the gentleman who invented this game. This is in
nineteen thirty eight. He was an unemployed architect at the
time and just into games. He's from Poughkeepsie. But I
believe the game was actually invented Actually I know this
for a fact in Jackson Heights Queen's because at eighty

(15:30):
first Street and thirty fifth Avenue, I believe is a
scrabble style street sign. I think it's. I think it's
thirty fifth Avenue has below each of the letters just
the little number value subscript, which is kind of just
a little nice, fun, cute nod.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Are you sure it's just that that community in particular
isn't big scrabble fans.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah, I'm positive.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
Okay, So he.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Did you say he was an unemployed architect.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
Yeah, at the time, and he was just into gaming
and wanted to invent a game that was part chance,
part skill.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah. So he did not have a great success with
it out of the gate. He initially tried to call
it Lexico and criss crosswords, and he took it around
to game manufacturers and they were like, nah, I'm not
really feeling this. Yeah, And that was the way it
went for a good decade before a man named James
Bruno bought the rights. He saw something in it that

(16:26):
I guess other people didn't. He renamed it Scrabble. He
changed the gameplay a little bit. One of the biggest
changes he made was that the way that Moser Butts
had come up with is that you just thought the
word in like a kind of a mental version of
the board, and the other player hopefully was able to
pick up on the word you were thinking. And so

(16:48):
Bruneau was like, maybe we should just replace with an
actual board and tiles, and that really kind of helped
move things along a bunch.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
Yeah, you know, I looked up this James Brunet, and
you know, we get a lot of great information a
lot of times from New York Times obituaries. And he
was a friend of Butts, and so they used to
play scrabble together on occasion, like their homemade version. And
once this guy took it over, he and his wife
Helen like operated out of their house and he was

(17:18):
like a certain point, like all that was in our
house was boxes of tiles and racks and boards, and
we could move around. So they had to. They moved
to an abandoned schoolhouse and then eventually a converted wood
working shop, and they had thirty five employees working two shifts,
producing six thousand scrabble sets sets a week by fifty

(17:43):
three by nineteen fifty three, So.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Within five years of him buying the rights, that is correct, sir, okay,
So that the year before that. I've seen it told
as a legend or a widely told story. Laura put it.
I don't know why no one's like, yeah, that's what happened.
But supposedly the president of Macy's came across the game,

(18:08):
I'm not sure how played it, liked it, ordered a
bunch to stock up. Of course, that meant gimbals immediately
followed suit, and so the game took off from there.
So this would have been nineteen fifty two when that
supposedly happened.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Yeah, and Bruno was like, we can't possibly keep up
with this demand, like this is just skyrocketed, which is great.
But they turned to a company, a game maker called
Selcho and Writer, and they took over making the game,
and they did so for decades. They were the people
who made Scrabble for a really long time. And within
two years, two years of that great Macy's president story happening,

(18:51):
four and a half million copies were sold. Like it
just hit America, like you know, a giant packet of
pop rocks and diet coke formentos.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, or like a ton n e of bricks, which
is worth more than ton nice Jeff so that's selling
pretty good. I think they've sold. They estimate about one
hundred and fifty million total sets as of you know,
kind of now, even though it's hard to get a
real firm number on that. But they bought that trademark

(19:25):
Selchow and writer I want to say Richter there, but
it is Writer bought that trademark from them. In seventy two,
Bruno got a million and a half bucks, which would
be about twelve million today. And this, by the way,
was like he was looking for something to do in retirement.
So wow, he really scored. That's a triple letter retirement gig,

(19:46):
I would say, or triple word even. And then the inventor,
mister Butts, got two hundred and sixty five grand wi
should be about two million bucks. Plus he got a
very small royalty that he seemed to be pretty happy with.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, he sounds like a great This is one of
the more heartwarming quotes I've come across in a while.
He was interviewed in nineteen eighty four about his invention,
and he said people are always asking me if I'm rich.
I used to get two to three cents for each
game sold. One third went to taxes. I gave one
third away and the other third enabled me to have

(20:20):
an enjoyable life. Great, and if there's such thing as heaven,
I believe that mister Butts is there right now.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
I think so too. He would have been in his
eighties then too, because I think he died in the
early nineties. In his nineties.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Okay, well, there you go. He had a great life, apparently.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
So things turned kind of dark when the Cabbage Patch
Kids bought Selcho and Writer in nineteen eighty six.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
You don't want to hear some funny what. Every time
I looked at that word, I said colco oh, and
I was like, well, I was like, that's so weird,
Like I grew up with Calico toys. Yeah, and I
just kept seeing it as colc and I was like,
wait a minute, dummy, it's Calico.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Well you must be a scrabbleist, because that would just
be like the word construct without any right of meaning
to it. So you're in there, Chuck. You really did
some method research?

Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, maybe so so.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Kalico. Yes, bought Selcho and Writer and just did not
really give much of a care about scrabble. I mean,
it was just a money maker. To them. Apparently they
were already in trouble, which is nuts that they declared
bankruptcy by nineteen eighty nine. I think I can't remember.

(21:38):
Surely we talked about it in our Cabbage Patch Kids
episode why that happened. But to go from having one
of the hottest toys in the history of toys to
bankrupt in the same decade as breathtaking as far as
business goes. But when Calico declared bankruptcy, has Bro stepped
in and they did seem to care a lot more

(22:00):
about Scrabble, and so under their ownership, I think it's
still owned by Hasbro if I'm not mistaken. It's been finitid.
It's ups and downs, as we'll see. But there was
also a bidding war for the international rights to produce Scrabble,
and matel beat them out for that right, and that
I can't imagine what a plumb that is. But it

(22:22):
also occurred to me, and I know we've done an
episode on intellectual property, but there's like there's some fictitious
right out there that says this one company is allowed
to produce all the games just internationally, this other company
has this other fictitious right to produce all of the
games just inside of the United States, And it's just

(22:44):
so mind blowing to me that we've just kind of
created that kind of made up structure for things, and
how much just gobs of money that legal fiction creates
for people.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Are you pushing for just an open source world?

Speaker 2 (23:00):
No, not necessarily. I don't have a problem with it.
I was more just astounded behind Yeah, you.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
Know, yeah, No, it's interesting. I mean, I mean, have
you ever dug into like TV rights for professional sports leagues?

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh, my god, is that I'll bet that's quite a jungle.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
Yeah, it is. And it's gotten really really expensive. Like
when you see the numbers, like you know, Amazon acquires
the right to air whatever Sunday Night football.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Or something, it's just like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
I astounding what kind of money we're talking about?

Speaker 2 (23:28):
For sure.

Speaker 3 (23:29):
Anyway, I guess we can move on to competitive scrabble,
because you know, a lot of people just play for
fundzies at home. I know, our bud John Hodgman and
his lovely wife Catherine play like for decades now because
they're high school sweethearts, so they're long, long, long term scrabblers,

(23:50):
you know, against each other. I kind of wanted to
find out if there was a lifetime record that they
keep up with surely, but then I just decided not
to ask.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah, Hodgman used to live tweet their games, Oh he did. Yeah,
it was really cute to just kind of follow along.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
I bet they're both good because Catherine's an English teacher
and John is you know, knows a lot of words.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah. Any anybody who knows Hodgman too, right when they
saw the scrabble episode of stuff you should know, knew
that there was one hundred percent chance. Yeah, Dodgmen was
going to come up at some point in time. For
sure he.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
Would have complained if we hadn't.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, for sure. He's a scrabble scrabble guy for sure.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
Yeah, he would smoke me. In fact, I feel like
I might have played him once on one of these
trips that I used to do with him for maximum fun.
But I don't know if we did play, it was
not even competitive at all. I'm sure I don't see
why he would have played. I don't see why he
would have played me, because I'm really just you know,

(24:52):
I'm like Steve Carell and Anchorman, Like I'll try to
spell lamp. It's just because I looked at one.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
You know, hey, man, if to some points, who cares.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, you and I probably be pretty good matchup.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, I think so too. We should play sometime.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
Yeah. Okay, So that sounded unenthusiastic. I meant hell yeah, buddy.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
All right, Sorry you can't see me, but I'm raising
the roof right now.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
So you mentioned competitive scrabble that there are tournaments, which
isn't very surprising. I mean, people are into scrabble, so
when you start throwing money down for like prize money
for tournaments, people are going to flock to them. And
for years, the main the biggest scrabble tournament, what they

(25:38):
called nationals, was the North American Invitational Scrabble Players Tournament,
which had its inaugural championship in nineteen seventy eight and
was held every year through to two thousand and nine.
And Selcho and Writer actually formed the National Scrabble Association,
which was very smart because that kind of thing generates

(26:01):
a lot of interest, enthusiasm. Newspapers cover Oh it's so crazy,
there's a scrabble championship right now, and like it just
helps keep the thing topical, you know, instead of just
letting people buy it and crossing your fingers that kind
of thing. It was a pretty smart business venture. And then,
like I said, Callco came along, they did nothing for it.

(26:25):
Apparently the Players Association had to shame Kalico into chipping
in five thousand dollars for prize money for the national tournament.
And then when Hasbro came along, they started funding it
a lot more lavishly. But then they kind of said,
you know, this isn't actually worth it anymore. You guys
are you know, maybe a few hundred people coming to

(26:48):
these tournaments and you all have all of the scrabble
boards that you're ever gonna need and I gonna buy anymore.
So they stopped funding those and they actually shut down
that the National Scrabble Association. So an independent version came up,
the North American Scrabble Players Association, I think back in
two thousand and nine is when it was formed.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
Yeah, and before anyone writes in technically they didn't completely
shut down the Nssay, they just stopped there. They weren't
in charge of the tournaments anymore. They just they moved
them over to another program called School Scrabble.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yes, because those kids have a long life of buying
scrabble boards ahead of them.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
That's right. You mentioned ups and downs over the years.
You know. I guess all board games go through kind
of boom periods and bus periods, or at least low periods,
and scrabble is no different. There was an early two
thousands boom. There were televised tournaments. It's interesting what drives
this stuff. I don't know if they know on the inside,

(27:49):
but I couldn't figure out why it would have had
a boom in the two thousands. Early two thousands.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Oh, a documentary called Word Freaks. I believe, oh that
it introduced it to a whole new generation.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
Oh okay, well your.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Head and yeah, and it took off like it like
Hasbro has a lot to be thankful for from that
documentary from what I understand.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
Oh, I bet the New York Times Crossword documentary to
kick that up a notch.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, for sure, that was a great one.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
But we're not talking crosswords again, so don't worry.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
It just busted out and sweat.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
You gotta flop, So what happening? There were seventy five
thousand rated scrabble tournament games in two thousand and four.
And that number by twenty nineteen was cut almost in half.
That went down to forty thousand, and the Nationals went
from eight hundred and thirty seven players to two eighty
over that same span. So it just seems like that
documentary really caused a resurgence, I guess, and then it

(28:46):
kind of went back to level set maybe.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
Yeah, for sure. There was also a lot of internal
strife to the North American Scrabble Players Association. Didn't make
a lot of friends. They established a real top down
hierarchy of how that association was run, so some other
players associations were developed splintered off. There was a lot

(29:09):
of fracture I guess in the scrabble community that just
kind of came around that time. That surely affected attracting
new people. Like I hate to use the word toxic
because I feel like it's definitely overused, but it feels
like that community got a lot more toxic around that time,

(29:30):
And you know that doesn't exactly attract people like, Hey,
I wanted to join that toxic subculture really mix it up.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah, well some people are into that.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, those aren't the people you want to attract your
toxic subculture though.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
Yeah, or play scrabble with. Right, if you're in a tournament,
you're going to see some big scores they have, you know,
scores over eight hundred points at times in tournaments. The
highest scoring legal word I don't think it's ever been
played officially, but that would be yes, one thousand, seven
hundred and eighty four point score if that was across

(30:06):
three different triple word scorers. That word is oxy oxyfin bututazone.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah, it's a now banned and said pain reliever.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
That's right. And since I know you looked it up
because I did too, I'll let you give the definition
of cazique, which is the highest score ever for a
word played in a tournament. Three hundred and ninety two
points for cazique.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
So, yeah, so that one. From what I could tell,
I found that as a Spanish word for an indigenous chieftain,
usually among Caribbean tribes.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
Yeah. I saw that the Taino people like the indigenous Bahamians, right,
and that was actually played amazing.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, I mean that's so that's one word for three
hundred and ninety two points. To put that into perspective,
a good you know, average person's scrabble score. From what
I could tell couple to a few hundred points. This
is like a scrabble score with just a high scrabble
score with just one one word. This is like the
level that these people are playing at. And Chuck, I

(31:11):
I say, we take another break and we'll come back
and we'll poke around in the brains of those high
level scrabble players and see what neurologists have found out recently.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
Let's do it. I want to learn about a terror
in college dactyl how to take a perg.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Is gone.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
That's another.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Word up, Jerry, Okay, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
So we've kind of made mentioned a couple of times
that people who play scrabble like think of words differently
than normis too, and there have been studies using the
Wonder Machine, in particular by neurologists of the brains of
people who play scrabble, because there's a lot of long
standing discussions, rival theories and hypotheses about how we process

(32:13):
words and information associated with words, and by studying scrabble players,
like high level scrabble players, they found that their brains
literally work different when it comes to words.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
Yeah, take it away.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Well, one of the studies, I can't remember what year
it was, I actually failed to look now that I
think about it. They found that when you put the
put a scrabble player through what's called the lexical decision task,
which is showing people very quickly jumbles of words and
saying is there a word in there too late? Is
there a word too late? They have to answer really

(32:50):
quick and there's always some lab assistant shouting too late
and really just mix things up a little bit. Scrabble
players use regions of their brains that most people wouldn't use.
They and they don't use regions of their brains that
people normally do use. Say so, like when you think
of a word, you think of the meaning. Usually that's

(33:11):
how you grasp a word when and you're really kind
of processing what the word is, there's a meaning attached
to it, there's a symbolism attached to it. With a
scrabble player, they do not think like that. They think
of words as physical constructs of letters. There's no meanings
aren't attached to them. That takes too long. They process

(33:32):
them much more quickly because it's just a bunch of
letters that you put together. It doesn't matter what it means.
It just matters that you can get this number of
points on a scrabble board. One of the other things
they found is that they also use more spatial reasoning
than the average person does when they're recognizing and processing
words and letters, because they have to figure out how

(33:53):
to orient them on the board and how they would
intersect with other words on the board. So the brains
change in the way they approach words change the more
scrabble you play.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah, I think it's it's almost like Tetris, like in
their brains at a certain point, like they might as
well just be Tetris blocks that are trying to fit in.
Obviously not Tetris because you can't make you know your
own size and shaped things.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
But you know what I mean, Sure, I know it,
you mean, I think I think it's a good analogy.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
There's some other cool studies that there are, you know,
kind of findings they found from different studies. The setup
of this one is basically that if you have a
college degree, they have found that you're less likely than
those without with you know, less education to get age
related memory loss in Alzheimer's. But in terms of scrabble,

(34:43):
they found that that gap can be closed a lot
if you don't have that college degree and you play
a lot of scrabble, you can close that gap to
where it's almost the same as people with higher levels
of education as far as acquiring that memory loss in
Alzheimer's pretty great.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Take that, college boy.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
What about the Ruskies? That was interesting too.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
I thought, Yeah, they studied Russian engineering students, and by they,
I mean the people who conducted this study. And they said, here,
Russian engineering students, we're going to teach you scrabble and
you're going to play it for a year, and then
we're going to test you. We're going to have you
play teachers who teach English as a foreign language. So
they're Russian, but they know a lot of English, and

(35:23):
we're going to play the English language scrabble by the way,
So there's all the pieces on the board right there.
And what they found is that the engineering students who
didn't speak that much English were able to i think,
in the words of the study, smoke the English as
a foreign language teachers in scrabble.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, even though the teachers knew more English than the
engineering students did.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
Yeah, that's super cool. They've also found that for tournament
play men dominate tournament scrabble tournaments generally speaking. But they've
done studies of this and they're like, hey, it's not
because men have big brains and women have little, tiny brains. Yeah,
it's not because guys can learn words better than women.

(36:08):
Has nothing to do with any of that. It has
to do with the fact that in general, overall, men
start younger than women do. Boys, I guess start younger
than girls when it comes to scrabble, and women generally
and girls play more scrabble. But they say that's not
necessarily how to get better at scrabble. They're playing for

(36:28):
fun and just having a good time, Whereas to get
better at scrabble, what these boys and men seem to
be doing more of is like anagramming stuff and analyzing
everything and instead of just like, hey, let's just play
some scrabble and have some fun, Like, let me research
and analyze this stuff so I can dominate in a
tournament exactly.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
But I mean, that's how you get better at apparently
anagram It was a huge thing to do if you
want to get better at scrabble, because when you look
at the you know, there's seven tiles on your tileholder,
it's just a jumble of letters, and you have to
find the words in those letters. That's part of the game.
So if you go practice that, yeah, you're gonna get
a lot better. But I saw that among just the

(37:08):
population in general, just people who play scrabble for fun,
it's much more closely divided. It's more like sixty forty
men to women.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's changed a lot over
the past couple of decades too.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah. I think that documentary probably helped quite a bit.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Yeah, when it comes to like, all right, what words, Like,
what dictionary do you use? There is a Scrabble Dictionary.
It's called the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary, was released in
nineteen seventy eight, again by Selchow and Writer, even though
they worked with Merriam Webster to produce the game, because
you know, they're dictionary people, and this has caused a
lot of controversy over the years because words have been added,

(37:47):
words have been taken away, and every time that happens
the scrabble community, you know, some people are like, great,
great change, and some people are like, no, I hate that.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Yeah, because to them they're just words. The meaning has
no purpose or point whatsoever in the game. It doesn't matter.
So why would you take any words out that we
could potentially use and score with.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
Some of the worst and the worst racial slurs out
there have been in the Scrabble Dictionary.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
Well, yeah, do you want to tell some people?

Speaker 3 (38:21):
Well, I mean, I'm not gonna say those, but there
is a list. I think there was a woman named
Judith Grad in the nineties who kind of got on
her I don't want to say got on her soapbox
because that indicates a bad thing. She got a campaign
going to have these slurs removed. The Anti Defamation League
got involved. Hasbro eventually said, all right, we're gonna remove

(38:44):
these words from the next edition of the dictionary. Booby gringo, farted, honky,
Whitey's pissed, fatso redneck, and wazoo.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
And Jerry best of luck beeping all those out.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
This should be pretty easy.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
So yeah, So there were a lot of scribble players
who were like, this is outrageous. Who cares about offensiveness?
And other people are like, this is kind of society
evolving in real time right here. So I guess has
Bro made a compromise and they said, well, how about
this for tournament level, We'll keep the original. We won't

(39:22):
take these words out. We'll have a separate book called
the Official Word List. Among players, it's called TWL ninety eight.
That's when it came out as nineteen ninety eight. But
for everybody else. And that, by the way, the TWL
nineteen ninety or ninety eight is just available to Players
Association members, so it's not like available in general public.

(39:44):
And then the other one, the toned down version, that's
the one that the public will be able to get
their hands on.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yeah, And that was in the early two thousands, and
then in twenty twenty, the Official Tournament removed a lot
of those slurs that they previously allowed for tournament play. Right,
and I also mentioned, you know, adding words. Over the
past few years, they've added hundreds of words. Jedi subtweet
vacs have been added. Beria as in Beria, tacos has

(40:14):
been added.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Oh and I discovered a new dish from this too,
Chuck cuckhumber usually spelled with a K, but apparently it's
also okay to spell with the C. It's an Indian
dish featuring cucumbers. It's like a fresh tomato cucumber salad.
And actually I should correct myself. I think it could
be Indian, but it's also possibly like Anatolian. I'm not

(40:37):
a hunt okity, sure, but it sounds delish. I'll send
you the recipe, all right, do it.

Speaker 3 (40:41):
They also had slang from time to time, apparently I'm
a I am m A as in I'm going to
like I'm about to do something right.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
You can play that, yeah, you could. You could also
play yeat, which is that I don't know many you know,
I really feel like I've outed myself in the last
couple episodes as skimbity to it buddy, not the edge
lord that people assume that I am edged lord.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
There has been some cheating over the years. We'll talk
about a couple of these incidents. Incidents. In twenty eleven,
there was a World Scrabble Championship between a tie player
named cholapot et Ari and a British guy named Ed
Martin because it was a missing G E tile. And
there's a lot of versions of this story. Apparently Time

(41:31):
Magazine and some scrabble websites say that Etri called for
Martin to be strip searched for that g and the
tournament officials were like, no, we're not going to do that.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
We don't want to.

Speaker 3 (41:43):
In mental floss, they said that, you know, they asked
them to turn their pockets inside out, and that eventually
just escalated to like, hey, maybe they hit it in
their pants, they should be stripped searched.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Maybe it's yeah, that's why you strip searched.

Speaker 3 (41:59):
Yeah, is that is that in the Scrabble dictionary.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
There's no way that it's not. As a matter of fact,
you keep talking, you tell the story, and I'm going
to look it up.

Speaker 3 (42:08):
Uh. And then what they eventually found out was that
the missing G was in the pocket of another player
from a previous game. And what I want to know is,
like who who's running these tournaments? Like how are you
not counting the letters before the game or cracking up
in a brand new scrabble seal factory sealed Scrabble, Like

(42:30):
you got to count those letters, You got to make sure.
That's like playing chess without like a pawn and just
being like, oh it looks good to me.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Yeah, it's nuts. It's also nuts. Just how how many
players do cheat in like high level tournaments.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
Like that kid, Yeah there was a kid.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
He was thirteen, so he's unnamed as far as I
can tell.

Speaker 3 (42:51):
He's of age. Now we should find him out in dots.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
He was playing down in Orlando at the Scrabble Nationals
in twenty twelve, and he got caught palming blank tiles.
And I don't know that we even mentioned what blank
tiles are good for, but they well, they can stand.
They're like a wild card. They stand in for any
letter that you want, so they can really come in

(43:14):
handy when you have like a bunch of letters but
you just can't quite connect them. That blank tile comes
in there and you say, thanks, blank tile. So if
you have that, you have a huge advantage. So finally,
this kid was caught cheating. But this was on the
heels of a year before when he won the two
thousand dollars prize for winning, even though apparently statistically the

(43:35):
percentage of blank tiles that he came up with across
the game or the games that he played throughout that
tournament where it just doesn't add up. But they let
that win stand. But for twenty twelve he got booted.

Speaker 3 (43:49):
Yeah, they should have made that kid pay that money
back with interest.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yeah, they should have.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
What else there there was a they had their own
little met too incident at one point too, didn't they.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Yeah, there's I don't want to say well regarded a
well known player named Sam Kantamathi. And he is not
just a player. He also has a side business of
like custom equipment like kile holders boards. Timers is another
one because in tournaments they used timers like chess. So
he's got his whole line. He's like really integral to

(44:23):
the current like scrabble World, tournament world. And for a
long time, especially before Me Too came along, he just
got away with it, Like the Players Association president would
make a point of escorting women who went up to
Kennamthe's hotel room to pick up equipment that they bought

(44:43):
from or were buying from him, like you just didn't
go alone, like it was an open secret. And then finally,
like he just groped the wrong woman, Me Too came
along and I think at least fifteen named women came
forward and put their story already on the record about him,
and the response from the Players Association was essentially like Okay,

(45:07):
don't do it again. Yeah, and he had already been
banned for cheating. He palmed tiles too, he was a
national champion. He palmed tiles too. He got suspended for
four years for cheating, but for the allegations of sexual misconduct. Nothing,
just a warning essentially, So that really ticked off a
lot of people, especially high level women players too, who

(45:29):
were like, you know what, we have, we hold our
own tournaments, and he's not invited any longer. So he's
kind of been ostracized. But I have the impression that
he's still very much.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
Around, still making those those custom racks.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, from what I can tell.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
By the way we live update. We did text John
Hodgman just to find out. I was kind of curious
about a couple of things, and about his highest scrabble
total ever and if he and Catherine have a running
record between them, and he says, we have old notebooks
full of score sheets, but we never go back and
look at them, because I said, you know, John Hodgmen
only looks forward. Time does not go backward.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
No, Nostalgia's a toxic impulse. According that's right, Hogman.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
We were both consistently in the three hundred to three
point fifty pretty good mode. Okay, that's that sounds high
to me. Yeah, same here, he said, this's good enough
to make me happy. He said we have both probably
broken four hundred a couple of times. I remember words
better than scores. Twenty five years ago, I added st
er to joke to make jokester on a triple word

(46:33):
square while playing with some of my with some friends
of my parents, And I don't remember the points, but
I was really proud of myself.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
I'll bet, I'll bet. Every once in a while you
can peek in on Hodgmen sleeping and he's got a
big smile on his face because he's dreaming about that.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
I haven't a live update as well. Chod is not
in the Scrabble really allowable word.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
Oh man, this opens up a whole new world of
possibilities for the show live updates.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Yeah, and Scrabble being the arbor of what words we
can and can't use now exactly. So Scrabble, of course,
is popped up in pop culture here or there. Rosemary's
Baby very famously used Mia Pharoh used well, Rosemary uses
scrabble a bunch of scrabble tiles to try to figure
out that some suspected witches were actually witches by using

(47:19):
the tiles to figure out anagrams. Yeah, same with sneakers.
I couldn't find that that I saw the movie. I
never saw the movie, and I couldn't find the clip
with the scrabble. I just saw mention of it in
a couple of places.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
I don't remember scrabble. It was a long time ago.
I love this one. Frank, Oh, Frank, the chairman of
the board, mister Sinatra in his version of the Twelve
Days so Christmas added nine games of scrabble. Yeah, that's right,
which is actually Joe Piscopo doing Frank.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Which that's all you need to do. That's better than Frank,
I think. And then Seinfeld and Calvin Hobbs both kind
of famously had scrabble made up high value scrabble words
in their shows. In the first season of Seinfeld, I.

Speaker 3 (48:05):
Don't remember who was it, do you know?

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Seinfeld's mom played quone quo n e and like, Seinfeld
calls her out on it and it's not actually a word,
but Kramer's like, yeah, quone whatever. But the biggest thing
that stood out to me in this scene that I
watched it today, they had the original dad just did

(48:28):
not work.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
Yeah, And then they brought in I can't remember his name,
but he was the dad and Arthur.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Oh was he the dad in Arthur?

Speaker 3 (48:35):
He was e Liza Minelli's father and Arthur Okay.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
Yeah he was. He was Morty Seinfeld.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
His first name is Barney. I think god I.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
Used to know his name because Arthur's you know, one
of my top ever comedies.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
And then Calvin and Hobbes. I think Calvin played z
q M or zeq FMGB and said it was a
type of worms from New Guinea.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
That's funny.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
And then lastly, Chuck, we can't forget scrabble led to
trivial pursuit being created, because remember they went and got
a new scrabble board, and we're like, how many scrabble
boards have we bought over the years? We should make
an end game. That's right, And that's it. Scrabble has
not appeared in any other part of pop culture except
for those things, right, that's right. You got anything else, no, sir?

(49:26):
All right, well let's scrabble everybody. Thank you for finally
doing it, Chuck. And since I thank Chuck for finally
relenting and giving in on doing an episode I've wanted
to do for years and years and years, it's time
for a listener mail.

Speaker 3 (49:40):
Oh you hi, guys, or basically just the voices that
live in my head permanently, because I listened to you
two all the time nice a while back. I have
no idea where the idea came from. I wonder whether
everyone sees concepts the same way in their head as
I do. And started asking around because she's referencing like

(50:01):
the Inner Dialogue app where people don't hear words, they
see images, and Daisy says this, and this is very interesting.
I think I noticed that for me, the calendar months
of the year in my brain are arranged like this January, February, March, April, May, June, July, December, November, October,
August on the line below, like it's very important the

(50:22):
way it's spaced out, I think. And it's also indented,
So December, November, October August is on the line below
and dented and dented to about mid February, so going
from left to right and then making a curve to
continue from right to left. No need to point out
how weird this is, guys, because no calendar ever was

(50:43):
drawn this way. However, this is how it is normal
for me in my head. You can imagine the weird
faces I got when asking this question enthusiastically to find
out about other people's head calendars, especially when I told
them about mine. Anyway, all this to ask, when you
picture a yearly calendar in your head, what does it
look like? Immediately when I read that, the only thing

(51:05):
that popped into my head was a like the back
of a of a like a wall calendar you would
get as a teenager, where I had all all of
them listed. That's what I picture.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Oh nice, So what are the what are the monthly
centerfolds over?

Speaker 3 (51:21):
Well, I don't know, but I guess it would just
be four four and four. Okay, that's how I pictured
it in my head January, February, March, April, and then
four more than four more in order.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Because I'm not weird, I don't know. I'm trying to
come up with it now, and I don't really think
I keep a calendar in my head. I'm just too
like in the present, you know, like in the now. Yeah, baby,
sorry to let you down. Who is that? Uh?

Speaker 3 (51:45):
That is Daisy and Daisy is from Belgium. Thanks Daisy,
that's the problem.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
That's from Belgia. There's your problem. Thanks a lot, Daisy,
that was wonderful. I feel like also that somebody can
make a T shirt of like the visual representation of
the calendar in Daisy's head, and it would be the
most arcane, deep cut stuff you Should Know te shirt
of all time.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Totally.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah. So, if you want to get in touch with
this like Daisy did and share your mental whatever, we
would love that. You can send us an email to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 3 (52:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,