The Scribble on Scrabble

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And yeah, here we are finally talking about Scrabble. I've been asking for you to do this with me for at least a decade and you kept refusing.
I still don't know why.

Speaker 12 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 15 And that was probably it.

Speaker 12 A big thanks to Laura for her help on this one.

Speaker 15 What was your nickname for her?

Speaker 12 Dr. Claw.
Dr. Claw.

Speaker 15 Do you play Scrabble? Are you a Scrabbler? I just kind of wanted to get that out of the way.

Speaker 12 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 15 Yeah, same. I mean, we own it.
And I have played Scrabble here and there. If somebody's like, hey, let's play Scrabble,

Speaker 15 I won't go like, no, sorry, not going to do it.

Speaker 15 But, you know, I'll play very occasionally, but I've never been a regular Scrabbler,

Speaker 15 nor am I very good at it at all, especially if I'm playing against somebody who, you know, because there's a lot more to it than just like knowing words.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Soccer, chess. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I mean, the list just keeps going on. It feels like we're about to add to it.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 Surfing.

Speaker 12 Yeah, surfing.

Speaker 15 I mean, we should probably just say that Scrabble, if you don't know, it's a board game

Speaker 15 in which two to four players use letters, little tiles, to spell out words on a board in a crossword-like fashion.

Speaker 12 Wow, that was a good description, Chuck.

Speaker 15 In other words, you know, the words have to intersect.

Speaker 15 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 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 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 out a suggested rule change.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 15 There is a word, Scrabble, and that means to, as a verb, to scratch or grope to try and collect something. or as a noun the act of doing that.

Speaker 15 And I propose that if 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 top of that.

Speaker 12 Of how many points? Million?

Speaker 15 Whatever's fair. That's where I just step back and say you guys handle it.

Speaker 12 Okay. You like to kick the hornet's nest and then watch them go.
I just think, I don't know. If you play the word Scrabble, give it a little, just a little bump.
I agree. I think you're right.

Speaker 15 All right. That's my only suggestion.
My only note.

Speaker 12 A little more about it. The Scrabble board is 15 by 15 squares, 25, 225 225 total squares and because it's 15 by 15 you're limited to no more than 15 letter words sure

Speaker 12 and

Speaker 12 just the 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 the you get up to 15 letter words by building onto other words

Speaker 12 because you could never spell more than a seven word because at no point in time do you ever have more than seven tiles.

Speaker 15 Right. And as I said, that seven tiles played at once is called a bingo.

Speaker 15 You add up your score at the end and tack on 50 points at that point.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 Or however many you get. Apparently, experts can play like, you know, three, four or five of those in a game sometimes.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 like, if you play a bingo across like a triple word score,

Speaker 12 you got a bunch of points. You basically just dusted your opponent in that one move, essentially.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, if you're just sort of amateur funsies Scrabble people, one big bingo like that can seal the game for you.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 It's called sending sending them packing with tears in their eyes, I think.

Speaker 15 In France, by the way, the bingo is called a scrabble.

Speaker 15 Just other nuts and bolts. You know, the tiles come in a little, they're little wooden tiles, little wooden square tiles, and on the tile is a letter and then a point value, sort of as a subscript.

Speaker 12 And then you keep your letters on a little wooden tile rack.

Speaker 15 And you, ideally, your opponent does not see those.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 Like, you know, it's they're facing away away from you if you're opposite your opponent.

Speaker 15 And that's a big part of like an expert or at least an accomplished or experienced scrabbolist is dummies like me, and I guess you, if you and I played, we'd just sit down and try and spell fart every chance we got.

Speaker 15 If you're an experienced scrabblist, you're almost like counting cards. Like you know how many letters

Speaker 15 are in the bag of like how many of each letter are 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.

Speaker 12 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 yeah for sure and it's not like evenly distributed for example there's 12 e's but there's only one j k q x and z

Speaker 12 and then the other letters are just kind of distributed in weird random ways um so that

Speaker 12 like you could i guess easily count that stuff if you play scrabble enough you're just going to pick up on how many are out there at any given point. Yeah.

Speaker 15 You've also got your blank tiles, which are worth zero points.

Speaker 15 But those really help out in making words possible that you couldn't get ordinarily.

Speaker 15 And then you've got your one-pointers, A-E-I-L-N-O-R-S-T,

Speaker 12 and you.

Speaker 12 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 15 You should say that after I list them all.

Speaker 12 Well, I was going to just do it by group, if that's okay with you. Sure.

Speaker 12 So the first group, one point, they use astronauts eat in limbo. No,

Speaker 12 right, silly tiger. Umbrella.
All right.

Speaker 15 The two-pointers are DNG.

Speaker 12 Dave and Gary.

Speaker 15 Okay. I would say doggone.

Speaker 15 Three points are B C M and P

Speaker 12 That is B chewing and masticating pizza.

Speaker 15 Does someone really suggest, like, hey, use these and don't make of your own?

Speaker 12 No, I'm making this up.

Speaker 15 I got you. This is all a bit.

Speaker 12 Mm-hmm. Okay.
Four points, we got F, H, V, and W, and Y. Right.
So for heaven's vake, why you?

Speaker 15 Okay, I get it now.

Speaker 15 You should have told me this is a bit.

Speaker 15 Five pointers, you get your K.

Speaker 15 K.

Speaker 15 Okay. Eight pointers, J and X.

Speaker 12 Jackson loves annex.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 15 Jackson loves?

Speaker 12 Yeah, you just have to ignore the L. Okay, all right.

Speaker 15 And then your 10-pointer, Josh. What are we going to end up with Q and Z?

Speaker 12 Quartz and quartz.

Speaker 15 That's great.

Speaker 12 I think I got it. You got it?

Speaker 15 Yeah, give me a quiz at the end. I'll put this away and then you can just quiz me.

Speaker 12 Yeah, once you learn that, you'll never never forget it.

Speaker 15 There is a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon, Andrew Thomas,

Speaker 15 who says if you go first, you have an advantage of 14 points. If you have that blank tile ever in the game, that's an advantage of 30 points if you're good at Scrabble, not like me.

Speaker 12 Right. There's also, like, if you have S tiles, there's a 10-point advantage.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 You should throw that on the end, though, right?

Speaker 12 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 ones another player wrote out.

Speaker 12 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 S.

Speaker 12 So that's a really easy way to rack up some quick points. And

Speaker 12 I think also probably annoy other players.

Speaker 12 I wonder about that.

Speaker 15 I'd like to hear from Scrabblers. I mean, if it's fair game, it's fair game.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 12 But there's plenty of rules that are fair game that are also like, you're a jackass.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 15 Let me see here. What else do we have? We have X and Z give you a three to five point advantage,

Speaker 15 even though they're tougher to use. And the Q is a five point disadvantage because,

Speaker 15 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 Q U.

Speaker 12 There's two that I know of. One is key.
QI. Yeah, I think I heard it.
QI or no, sorry, that's chi.

Speaker 12 Life force, I think. Okay.

Speaker 12 And you get 11 points for that one. And then I can't remember.
There's one more that's like a

Speaker 12 Q word that does not require a U.

Speaker 15 Oh, no, QI is in here because that's the highest scoring two-letter word along with Z-A. Is that what you said?

Speaker 12 Yeah. And I looked up Z-A, ZA,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I wonder if, because I did the same thing you did. Every time they gave an example, Laura found an example of a word that's unusual or high scoring, I always looked it up because I was curious.

Speaker 15 I wonder if that's part of the love of Scrabble is actually learning what these words mean, or if they're like, I really don't care. I just care how much it's worth.

Speaker 12 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, that'll come up later with those controversial words. Oh, sure.
Yeah,

Speaker 12 it's just us. We're curious types.
Scrabble players are not.

Speaker 15 That's true. The highest scoring three-letter word is Zach's, a 19-pointer, and Zek is 16.

Speaker 15 Quiz is a four-letter word worth the most at 22.

Speaker 12 That means like a test of sorts. Okay.

Speaker 15 And then Zippy, what does that mean?

Speaker 12 The pinhead.

Speaker 15 Zippy the pinhead? What's that?

Speaker 12 Oh, it's a really weird 80s comic strip. You know the clown with the Zippy the Pinhead? No, I don't know it.
Oh, you should look it up.

Speaker 12 It's weird. It's a weird comic strip.
Okay, I don't know it. But it couldn't be that.
Sorry.

Speaker 12 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 15 Ah, okay, good point.

Speaker 12 Thanks.

Speaker 15 You can't use proper nouns.

Speaker 12 No, you can't.

Speaker 15 Might as well go ahead and say that.

Speaker 12 They're really serious about that stuff, too. Oh, I bet.

Speaker 15 Uh, see, I'm a house rules guy, so I can, you know, as long as everyone's on board, I think you can

Speaker 15 have your own house rules first.

Speaker 12 Oh, I agree.

Speaker 15 Don't bring that into a tournament.

Speaker 12 No, get that mess out of here, is what they'll tell you.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but like, if I were to play with Ruby, she'd and I'd probably say, like, hey, we can use proper announcements because she'll want to put our dog's name or something.

Speaker 12 Or maybe I would. Right.

Speaker 15 I did look up the highest-scoring

Speaker 15 bingo, and that is

Speaker 15 Muzjix, M-U-Z-J-I-K-S, which is a Russian peasant.

Speaker 12 Wow. Well, that's...

Speaker 15 It's probably

Speaker 15 Mujiks or something.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I like it both ways, though.
Muzjiks.

Speaker 12 Look at all the Muzjix toiling in the fields. Yeah, I like that.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 I was confused because there's a lot of, like, one of the rules is no proper nouns, no words that end in apostrophe or require an apostrophe. Yeah.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 But a Muzzjix 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.

Speaker 12 But I just don't see how it could be. That's just weird to me.

Speaker 15 Well, what's weird is your college band, I know for a fact, was J. Clark and the Muzzchicks.

Speaker 12 Yes, but we were trying to be exotic, you know?

Speaker 15 And we should also say that Scrabble, I think, is now up to 30 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.

Speaker 15 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. So there's not a lot of, I mean, mean,

Speaker 15 sure, there are obviously words shorter than seven words in Germany, but a lot less than a lot of other languages.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 15 So it must just be bingo city or whatever bingo city is in German.

Speaker 12 There's also bingo, I don't know what city? Bingo bird.

Speaker 12 Stadt, maybe? Bingo Stadt.

Speaker 12 Sure.

Speaker 12 There's a, so in some other countries too, in foreign language versions of Scrabble,

Speaker 12 there are some adjustments with the tiles. Like some have more than 100 tiles.
Oh, right.

Speaker 15 Because of weird little letters. Yeah.

Speaker 12 There's like double L and double R in the Spanish language version. There's also the N with the tilde over it.
That's also a tile. Yeah, spice it up a little.
Yeah, I think that's worth eight points.

Speaker 12 Nice. Yeah, but you have to remember that that's eight points.
You have to say nice.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 Should we take a break? I like how this is headed. Yeah.

Speaker 12 All right. We'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

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Speaker 15 All right, we're back. And if you're going to talk about Scrabble, you got to talk about Alfred Mosher Butts because he is the gentleman who invented this game.
This is in 1938.

Speaker 15 He was an unemployed architect at the time and just into games. He's from Poughkeepsie, but I believe the game was actually invented.

Speaker 15 Actually, I know this for a fact in Jackson Heights, Queens, because at 81st Street and 35th Avenue, I believe, is a Scrabble-style street sign.

Speaker 15 I think it's 35th Avenue has below each of the letters is the little number value subscript, which is kind of just a little nice, fun, cute nod.

Speaker 12 Are you sure it's just that that community in particular isn't big Scrabble fans? Yeah, I'm positive. Okay.

Speaker 12 So he, did you say he was an unemployed architect?

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

Speaker 12 Yeah, so he did not have a great success with it out of the gate.

Speaker 12 He initially tried to call it Lexico and crisscross words, and he took it around to game manufacturers and they're like, nah, I'm not really feeling this.

Speaker 12 And that was the way it went for a good decade before a man named James Bruno

Speaker 12 bought the rights. He saw something in it that I guess other people didn't.
He renamed it Scrabble.

Speaker 12 He changed the gameplay a little bit.

Speaker 12 One of the biggest changes he made was that the way that Mosier Butts had come up with is that you just thought the word in like a kind of a mental version of the board.

Speaker 12 And the other player, hopefully, was able to pick up on the word you were thinking. And so Bruno was like, maybe we should just replace with an actual board and tiles.

Speaker 12 And that really kind of helped move things along. a bunch.

Speaker 15 Yeah, you know, I looked up this James Bruno, and, you know, we get a lot of great information a lot of times from New York Times obituaries.

Speaker 15 And he was a friend of Butts. And so they used to play Scrabble together on occasion, like their homemade version.

Speaker 15 And once this guy took it over, he and his wife, Helen, like operated out of their house. And he was like, at a certain point, like all that was in our house was boxes of tiles and racks and boards.

Speaker 15 And we couldn't move around. So they had to,

Speaker 15 they moved to an abandoned schoolhouse

Speaker 15 and then eventually a converted woodworking shop and they had 35 employees working two shifts producing 6 000 scrabble sets uh sets a week wow by 53 by 1953.

Speaker 12 so within five years of him buying the rights

Speaker 12 that is correct sir okay so that that the year before that i've seen it um 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.

Speaker 12 But supposedly, the president of Macy's came across the

Speaker 12 game. 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

Speaker 12 the game took off from there. So this would have been 1952 when that supposedly happened.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And Bruno was like, we can't possibly keep up with this demand. Like, this is just skyrocketed, which is great.

Speaker 12 But they turned to a company, a game maker, called Celcho and Ryder, and they took over making the game. Um, and they did so for

Speaker 12 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, four and a half million copies were sold.

Speaker 12 Like, it just hit America like you know,

Speaker 12 a giant packet of pop rocks and diet coke or mentos yeah or like a t-o-n-ne-e of bricks which is worth more than t-on

Speaker 12 nice choke

Speaker 15 uh so that's selling pretty good i think they've sold uh they estimate about 150 million total sets as of you know kind of now yeah even though it's hard to get a real firm number on that uh but they uh bought that trademark sell cho and writer uh i want to say richter there but it is writer

Speaker 15 um bought that trademark from them in 72.

Speaker 15 Bruno got a million and a half bucks, which would be about 12 million today. And this, by the way, was like he was looking for something to do in retirement.
So

Speaker 15 he really scored.

Speaker 15 That's a triple letter retirement gig, I would say. Right.
Or triple word even.

Speaker 15 And then the inventor, Mr. Butts, got 265 grand, which would be about 2 million bucks.
Plus, he got a very small royalty that he seemed to be pretty happy with. Yeah.
He sounds like a great guy.

Speaker 12 This is one of the more heartwarming quotes I've come across in a while.

Speaker 12 He was interviewed in 1984 about

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I gave one third away and the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life. Great.
And if there's such thing as heaven, I believe that Mr. Butts is there right now.

Speaker 15 I think so too. He would have been in his 80s then too, because I think he died in the early 90s in his 90s uh

Speaker 12 okay well there you go

Speaker 12 he had a great life apparently i love it so um things turned kind of dark when the cabbage patch kids bought cell cho and rider in 1986 you want to hear something funny what every time i looked at that word i said cold

Speaker 15 oh and i was like I was like, that's so weird. Like, I grew up with Coleco toys.
Yeah. And I just kept seeing it as Coleco.
And I was like, wait a minute, you dummy. It's Coleco.

Speaker 12 Well, you must be a Scrabbleist because that would just be like the word construct without any

Speaker 12 of meaning to it. So you're in there, Chuck.
You really did some method research. Yeah, maybe so.
So Coleco, yes, bought Celcho and Ryder

Speaker 12 and just did not really give.

Speaker 12 much of a care about Scrabble. I mean, it was just a moneymaker to them.
Apparently, they were already in trouble, which is nuts that they declared bankruptcy by 1989. I think,

Speaker 12 I can't remember. Surely we talked about in our Cabbage Patch Kids episode why that happened.
But to go from

Speaker 12 having one of the hottest toys in the history of toys to bankrupt in the same decade is breathtaking as far as business goes.

Speaker 12 When Coleco declared bankruptcy, Hasbro stepped in, and they did seem to care a lot more about Scrabble.

Speaker 12 And so, under their ownership, I think it's still owned by Hasbro, if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 12 It's been fine, it's had its ups and downs, as we'll see. But there was also a bidding war for the international rights to produce Scrabble, and Mattel beat them out for that.

Speaker 12 And that, I can't imagine what a plum that is.

Speaker 12 But it 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.

Speaker 12 This other company has this other fictitious right to produce all the games just inside of the United States.

Speaker 12 And it's just 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 15 Are you pushing for just an open source world?

Speaker 12 No, not necessarily. I don't have a problem with it.
I was more just astounded by it. You know? Yeah.

Speaker 15 No, it's interesting. I mean, I mean, have you ever dug into like TB rights for professional sports leagues?

Speaker 12 Oh, my God. Is that, I'll bet that's quite a jungle.

Speaker 15 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 or something.

Speaker 15 It's just like, oh, yeah. Yeah.
I know. It's just astounding what kind of money we're talking about.

Speaker 12 For sure.

Speaker 15 Anyway, I guess we can move on to competitive scrabble because, you know, a lot of people just play for funsies at home.

Speaker 15 I know our bud John Hodgman and his lovely wife, Catherine, play

Speaker 15 like for decades now because they're high school sweethearts. So they're long, long, long-term scrabblers,

Speaker 15 you know, against each other. I kind of wanted to find out if there was a lifetime record that they keep up with.

Speaker 12 Surely.

Speaker 15 But then I just decided not to ask.

Speaker 12 Yeah, Hodgman used to live tweet their games. Oh, he did? Yeah, it was really cute to just kind of follow along.

Speaker 15 I bet they're both good because Catherine's an English teacher and John is, you know, knows a lot of words. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Anybody who knows Hodgman, too, right, when they saw the Scrabble episode of Stuff You Should Know, knew that there was a hundred percent chance that Hodgman was going to come up at some point in time for sure.

Speaker 15 He would have complained if we hadn't.

Speaker 12 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 12 He's a

Speaker 12 Scrabble guy for sure.

Speaker 15 Yeah. He would smoke me.

Speaker 12 In fact,

Speaker 15 I feel like I might have played him once on one of these trips that I used to do with him

Speaker 15 for maximum fun.

Speaker 15 But I don't know.

Speaker 15 If we did play, it was not even competitive at all.

Speaker 12 I'm sure.

Speaker 15 I don't see why he would have played me because I'm really just, you know, I'm like Steve Carell and Anchorman. I'll try to spell lamp just because I looked at one.

Speaker 12 Hey, man, if it gets you some points, who cares?

Speaker 15 Yeah, you and I probably be pretty good, you know, matchup.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think so too. We should play sometime.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 Okay. So, uh, I sounded unenthusiastic.
I meant, hell yeah, buddy. All right.

Speaker 12 Sorry, you can't see me, but I'm raising the roof right now.

Speaker 15 Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 12 So, um,

Speaker 12 you mentioned competitive Scrabble, that there are tournaments, which isn't very surprising. I mean, people are into Scrabble.
So

Speaker 12 when you start throwing money down for like prize money for tournaments, people are going to flock to them. And for years,

Speaker 12 the main, the biggest Scrabble tournament, what they called nationals, was the North American Invitational Scrabble Players Tournament, which had its inaugural championship in 1978 and was held every year through to 2009.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 Celcho and Ryder actually formed the National Scrabble Association, which was very smart because that kind of thing generates a lot of interest and enthusiasm. Newspapers cover, oh, it's so crazy.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 It was a pretty smart business venture. And then, like I said, Coleco came along.
They did. nothing for it.

Speaker 12 Apparently, the Players Association had to shame Coleco into chipping in $5,000 for prize money for the national tournament.

Speaker 12 And then when Hasbro came along, they started funding it a lot more lavishly. But then they kind of said, you know,

Speaker 12 this isn't actually worth it anymore. You guys are,

Speaker 12 you know,

Speaker 12 maybe a few hundred people coming to these tournaments and you all have all of the Scrabble. boards that you're ever going to need.
You're not going to buy anymore.

Speaker 12 So they stopped funding those and they actually shut down

Speaker 12 the

Speaker 12 National Scrabble Association. So an independent version came up, the North American Scrabble Players Association.
I think back in 2009 is when it was formed.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And before anyone writes in, technically they didn't completely shut down the NSA.
They just stopped their,

Speaker 15 they weren't in charge of the tournaments anymore. They just they moved them over to another program called School Scrabble.

Speaker 12 Yes, because those kids have a long life of buying Scrabble boards ahead of them.

Speaker 15 That's right. You mentioned ups and downs over the years.

Speaker 15 You know, I guess all board games go through kind of boom periods and bust periods, or at least low periods. And Scrabble is no different.
There was an early 2000s boom.

Speaker 15 There were televised tournaments. It's interesting what drives this stuff.

Speaker 15 I don't know if they know on the inside, but I couldn't figure out why it would have had a boom in the 2000s, early 2000s.

Speaker 12 Oh,

Speaker 12 a documentary called Word Freaks, I believe. Oh, is that what did it? It introduced it to a whole new generation.
Oh, okay. Well, there you have him.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and it took off like it, like, like Hasbro has a lot to be thankful for from that documentary, from what I understand.

Speaker 15 Oh, I bet the New York Times crossword documentary, too, kicked that up a notch.

Speaker 12 Yeah, for sure. That was a great one.

Speaker 15 But we're not talking crosswords again, so don't worry.

Speaker 12 I just busted out in sweat.

Speaker 15 You got a flop sweat happening. There were 75,000 rated Scrabble tournament games in 2004, And that number by 2019 was cut almost in half.
That went down to 40,000.

Speaker 15 And the Nationals went from 837 players to 280 over that same span. So it just seems like that documentary really caused a resurgence, I guess, and then it kind of went back to level set, maybe.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 For sure. There was also a lot of internal strife, too.
The North American Scrabble Players Association didn't make a lot of friends.

Speaker 12 They established a real top-down hierarchy of how that that association was run so some other players associations were developed splintered off um there was a lot of

Speaker 12 fracture i guess in the scrabble community um

Speaker 12 that just kind of came around that time that surely affected attracting new people like

Speaker 12 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. And, you know, that doesn't exactly attract people.

Speaker 12 Like, hey, I want to join that toxic subculture.

Speaker 12 Really mix it up. Yeah.
Well, some people are into that. Yeah.
Those aren't the people you want to attract to your toxic subculture, though. Yeah, or play Scrabble with.
Right.

Speaker 15 If you're in a tournament, you're going to see some big scores. They have, you know, scores over 800 points at times in tournaments.

Speaker 15 The highest scoring legal word, I don't think it's ever been played officially, but that would be a 1,784 point

Speaker 15 score if that was across three different triple word scores. And that word is

Speaker 15 oxyfenbutazone.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's a now banned

Speaker 12 NSAID pain reliever.

Speaker 15 That's right. And since I know you looked it up, because I did too, I'll let you give the definition of Kazik, which is the highest score ever.
for a word played in a tournament. 392 points for Kazik.

Speaker 12 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 15 Yeah, I saw the Taino people like the indigenous Bahamians.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 And that was actually played.

Speaker 15 Amazing.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I mean, so that's one word for 392 points. To put that into perspective, a good, you know, average person's Scrabble score, from what I can tell, a couple to a few hundred points.

Speaker 12 This is like a Scrabble score with just a high Scrabble score with just one word. This is like the level that these people are playing at.

Speaker 12 And, Chuck, 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. Let's do it.

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Speaker 12 Okay, Chuck, so we've kind of made mention a couple of times that people who play Scrabble like think of words differently than normies do.

Speaker 12 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 words and information associated with words.

Speaker 12 And by studying Scrabble players, like high-level Scrabble players, they found that their brains literally work different when it comes to words yeah uh

Speaker 12 take it away well one of the studies um i can't remember what year it was i actually failed to look now that i think about it they found that um when you uh put the uh put a scrabble player through that what's called the lexical decision task which is um showing people very quickly jumbles of words and saying, is there a word in there?

Speaker 12 Too late. Is there a word in here? Too late.

Speaker 12 And they have to answer really quick. And there's always some lab assistant shouting too late and really just mix things up a little bit.

Speaker 12 Scrabble players use regions of their brains that most people wouldn't use.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 That's how you grasp a word 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.

Speaker 12 With the Scrabble player, they do not think like that. They think of words as physical constructs of letters.

Speaker 12 Meanings aren't attached to them. That takes too long.
They process them much more quickly because it's just a bunch of letters that you put together. It doesn't matter what it means.

Speaker 12 It just matters that you can get this number of points on a Scrabble board.

Speaker 12 And 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 to orient them on the board and how they would intersect with other words on the board.

Speaker 12 So their brains change and the way they approach words change the more Scrabble you play.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Obviously not Tetris because you can't make your own size and shaped things, but you know what I mean?

Speaker 12 Sure. I know what you mean.

Speaker 15 that's definitely i think it's a good analogy uh there's some other cool studies that there are you know kind of findings they found from different studies uh the setup of this one is basically that if you have a college degree uh they have found that you're less likely than those without uh with you know less education to get uh age-related memory loss and alzheimer's But in terms of Scrabble, they found that that gap can be closed a lot.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Pretty great.

Speaker 12 Take that, college boy.

Speaker 15 What about the Ruskis? That was interesting too, I thought.

Speaker 12 Yeah, they studied Russian engineering students. And by they, I mean the people who conducted this study.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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 we're going to play the English language Scrabble, by the way.

Speaker 12 So there's all the pieces on the board right there.

Speaker 12 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 12 That's incredible. Yeah, even though

Speaker 12 the teachers knew more English than the engineering students did.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that's super cool. They've also found that for tournament play,

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's not because guys can learn words better than women. It has nothing to do with any of that.
It has to do with the fact that in general, overall,

Speaker 15 men start younger than women do. Boys, I guess, start younger than girls when it comes to Scrabble.

Speaker 15 And 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 fun and just having a good time.

Speaker 15 Whereas to get better at Scrabble, what these boys and men seem to be doing more of is like anagramming stuff and analyzing everything.

Speaker 15 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 12 But I mean, that's how you get better at it. Apparently, anagramming is a huge thing to do if you want to get better at Scrabble.

Speaker 12 Because when you look at the, you know, there's seven tiles on your tile holder, it's just a jumble of letters, and you have to find the words in those letters.

Speaker 12 That's part of the game. So if you go practice that, yeah, you're going to get a lot better.

Speaker 12 But I saw that among just the population in general, just people who play Scrabble for fun, it's much more closely divided. It's more like 60, 40 men to women.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And I think it's changed a lot over the past couple of of decades too.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I think that documentary probably helped quite a bit.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 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 Players Dictionary.

Speaker 15 It was released in 1978 again by Selchow and Ryder, even though they worked with Merriam-Webster to produce the game because, you know, they're dictionary people.

Speaker 15 And this has caused a lot of controversy over the years because words have been added, words have been taken away. And every time that happens,

Speaker 15 the Scrabble community, you know, some people are like, great, great change. And some people are like, no, I hate that.

Speaker 12 Yeah, because to them, they're just words. The meaning has no purpose or point whatsoever in the game.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 12 So why would you take any words out that we could potentially use and score with?

Speaker 15 Some of the worst and the worst racial slurs out there have been in the Scrabble dictionary.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Do you want to tell some people?

Speaker 15 Well, I mean, I'm not going to say those, but there is a list. I think there was a woman named Judith Grad in the 90s who kind of

Speaker 15 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 the slurs removed.

Speaker 15 The anti-defamation league got involved. Hasbro eventually said, all right, we're going to remove these words from the next edition of the dictionary.

Speaker 15 Booby, gringo, farted, bl,

Speaker 15 Honky,

Speaker 15 Whiteys, Pissed, Fatso, Redneck, and Wazoo.

Speaker 12 And Jerry, best of luck beeping all those out.

Speaker 15 That should be pretty easy.

Speaker 12 So yeah, so there were a lot of Skywall 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.

Speaker 12 So I guess Hasbro

Speaker 12 made a compromise and they said, well, how about this? For tournament level, we'll keep the original, we won't take these words out. We'll have a separate book called the Official Word List.

Speaker 12 Among players, it's called TWL 98. That's when it came out as 1998.
But for everybody else, and that, by the way, the TWL 1990 or 98 is just available to Players Association members.

Speaker 12 So it's not like available to the general public. And then the other one,

Speaker 12 the toned-down version, that's the one that the public will be able to get their hands on.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and that was in the early 2000s. And then in 2020, the official tournament removed a lot of those slurs that they previously allowed for tournament play.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 And I also mentioned, you know, adding words. Over the past few years, they've added hundreds of words.
Jedi,

Speaker 15 Subtweet, Vax have been added.

Speaker 15 Biria is in birya tacos has been added.

Speaker 12 Oh, and I discovered a new dish from this too, Chuck. Cockumber.

Speaker 12 Usually spelled with a K, but apparently it's also okay to spell with a C. It's an Indian dish featuring cucumbers.
Oh. It's like a fresh tomato cucumber salad.
And actually, I should correct myself.

Speaker 12 I think it could be Indian, but it's also possibly like Anatolian. I'm not 100% sure, but it sounds delicious.
I'll send you the recipe. All right, do it.

Speaker 15 They also add slang from time to time. Apparently,

Speaker 12 I'm a.

Speaker 15 I-M-M-A.

Speaker 12 As in, I'm going to.

Speaker 15 Like, I'm about to do something.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 You can play that. Yeah, you could.
You could also play Yeet.

Speaker 12 Who is that? I don't know, man.

Speaker 12 You know, I really feel like I've outed myself in the last couple episodes. Skibbity toilet, buddy.
Not the edgelord that people assume that I am. Edgelord.

Speaker 15 There has been some cheating over the years. We'll talk about a couple of these

Speaker 15 incidents.

Speaker 15 In 2011, there was a World Scrabble Championship between a Thai player named Cholapat Etari and a British guy named Ed Martin because it was a missing G tile.

Speaker 15 And there's a lot of versions of this story. Apparently, Time magazine and some Scrabble websites say that E.T.R.E.
called for Martin to be stripped searched for that G.

Speaker 15 And the tournament officials were like, no, we're not going to do that.

Speaker 12 We don't want to see that.

Speaker 15 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 hid it in their pants.

Speaker 15 They should be strips searched.

Speaker 12 Maybe it's in their chode.

Speaker 12 That's why you strip search.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Is that in the Scrabble dictionary?

Speaker 12 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 15 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?

Speaker 15 Like, how are you not counting the letters before the game or cracking open a brand new Scrabble, factory-sealed Scrabble? Like, you got to count those letters.

Speaker 15 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 12 Yeah, it's nuts. It's also nuts just

Speaker 12 how many players do cheat in like high-level tournaments.

Speaker 15 Like that kid?

Speaker 12 Yeah, there was a kid. He was 13, so he's unnamed as far as I can tell.

Speaker 15 He's of age now. We should find him out.

Speaker 12 Doctor.

Speaker 12 He was playing down in Orlando at the Scrabble Nationals in 2012, and he got caught palming blank tiles.

Speaker 12 What a jerk. I don't know that we even mentioned what blank tiles are good for, but

Speaker 12 they're like a wild card. They stand in for any letter that you want.

Speaker 12 So they can really come in 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, say, thanks, blank tile.

Speaker 12 So if you have that, you have a huge advantage.

Speaker 12 So finally, this kid was caught cheating, but this was on the heels of a year before when he won the $2,000 prize for winning, even though apparently statistically, the percentage of blank tiles that he came up with across the game or the games that he played throughout that tournament were, it just doesn't add up.

Speaker 12 But they let that win stand. But for 2012, he got booted.

Speaker 15 Yeah, they should have made that kid pay that money back with interest yeah they should have uh

Speaker 15 what else there there was a they had their own little me too incident at one point too didn't they yeah there's uh

Speaker 12 i i don't want to say well-regarded a well-known player named sam contamathe

Speaker 12 and he is not just a player he also has a side business of like custom equipment like tile holders boards timers is another one because in tournaments they they use timers like chess uh-huh so he's got his whole line He's like really integral to the current

Speaker 12 like Scrabble world, tournament world. And for a long time, especially before Me Too came along, he just got away with it.

Speaker 12 Like the Players Association president would make a point of escorting women who went up to Canna Matthew's hotel room to pick up equipment that they bought from him or were buying from him.

Speaker 12 Like you just didn't go alone. Like it was an open secret.
And then finally, like he just groped the wrong woman. And me too came along.

Speaker 12 And I think at least 15 named women came forward and put their story on the record about him. And

Speaker 12 the response from the Players Association was essentially like, okay, but don't do it again. Yeah.
And he had already been banned for cheating. He palmed tiles too.
He was a national champion.

Speaker 12 He palmed tiles too. He got suspended for four years for cheating, but for the allegations of sexual misconduct, nothing, just a warning, essentially.

Speaker 12 So that really ticked off a lot of people, especially high-level women players too, who were like, you know what?

Speaker 12 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 around.

Speaker 15 Still making those custom racks.

Speaker 12 Yeah, from what I can tell.

Speaker 15 By the way, we live update. We did text John Hodgman just to find out.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And he says, we have old notebooks full of score sheets, but we never go back and look at them because obviously we know John Hodgman only looks forward. Time does not go backward.

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 12 Nostalgia is a toxic impulse, according to

Speaker 15 Hodgman. We were both consistently in the 300 to 350 pretty good mode.
Okay, that sounds high to me.

Speaker 12 Yeah, same here.

Speaker 15 He said, that's good enough to make make me happy. He said, we have both probably broken 400 a couple of times.
I remember words better than scores.

Speaker 15 25 years ago, I added S-T-E-R to joke to make Joke stir on a triple word square while playing with some of my with some friends of my parents.

Speaker 15 And I don't remember the points, but I was really proud of myself.

Speaker 12 I'll bet. I'll bet every once in a while you can peek in on Hodgman sleeping and he's got a big smile on his face because he's dreaming about that.
I love it. I have a live update as well.

Speaker 12 Choad is not in the Scrabble

Speaker 12 allowable word.

Speaker 15 Oh man, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the show. Live updates.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and Scrabble being the arbiter of what words we can and can't use now.

Speaker 15 Exactly.

Speaker 12 So Scrabble, of course, has popped up in pop culture here or there.

Speaker 12 Rosemary's Baby very famously used, Mia Farrow used, well, Rosemary, used a Scrabble, a bunch of Scrabble tiles to try to figure out that some suspected witches were actually witches by using the tiles to figure out anagrams.

Speaker 12 Same with sneakers. I couldn't find that.

Speaker 12 I saw that movie. I never saw the movie.
I couldn't find the clip with the Scrabble. I just saw mention of it in a couple of places.

Speaker 15 I don't remember Scrabble. It was a long time ago.

Speaker 15 I love this one. Frank.
Oh, Frank, the chairman of the board, Mr. Sinatra, in his version of the 12 Days of Christmas, added nine games of Scrabble.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 15 Which is actually Joe Piscopo doing Frank.

Speaker 12 Which that's all you need to do. That's better than Frank, I think.
And then Seinfeld and Calvin Hobbes both kind of famously had Scrabble, made-up, high-value Scrabble words in their shows.

Speaker 12 In the first season of Seinfeld, I don't remember. Who was it?

Speaker 15 Do you know?

Speaker 12 Seinfeld's mom played Quone, Q-U-O-N-E.

Speaker 12 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, I watched it today,

Speaker 12 had the original dad, it just did not work.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And then they brought in, I can't remember his name, but he was the dad in Arthur.

Speaker 12 Oh, was he the dad and Arthur?

Speaker 15 He was Liza Minelli's father and Arthur.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he was

Speaker 12 Morty Seinfeld. Yeah, totally.
His first name's Barney, I think.

Speaker 15 God, I used to know his name because Arthur's, you know, one of my top ever comedies.

Speaker 12 And then Calvin and Hobbes, I think Calvin played ZQM or ZQFMGB and said it was a type of worms from New Guinea.

Speaker 15 Oh, that's funny.

Speaker 12 And then lastly, Chuck, we can't forget Scrabble led to Trivial Pursuit being created because remember they

Speaker 12 went and got a new Scrabble board and we're like, how many Scrabble boards have we bought over the years? We should make our own game. That's right.
And that's it.

Speaker 12 Scrabble has not appeared in any other part of pop culture except for those things. Right.

Speaker 12 That's right.

Speaker 12 You got anything else? No, sir. All right.
Well, that's Scrabble, everybody. Thank you for finally doing it, Chuck.

Speaker 12 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, man.

Speaker 15 Oh, you.

Speaker 15 Hi, guys.

Speaker 15 Or basically, just the voices that live in my head permanently because I listen to you two all the the time.

Speaker 12 Nice.

Speaker 15 A while back, I have no idea where the idea came from.

Speaker 15 I wonder whether everyone sees concepts the same way in their head as I do and started asking around because she's referencing like the inner dialogue app where people don't hear words, they see images.

Speaker 15 And Daisy says this, and this is very interesting, I think.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Wow.

Speaker 15 On the line below.

Speaker 15 Like, it's very important the way it's spaced out, I think.

Speaker 15 And it's not, it's also indented. So December, November, October, August is on the line below and dented to about mid-February.

Speaker 15 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 drawn this way.

Speaker 15 However, this is how it is normal for me in my head.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Anyway, all this to ask, when you picture a yearly calendar in your head, what does it look like?

Speaker 15 Immediately when I read that, the only thing that popped into my head was

Speaker 15 like the back of a...

Speaker 15 like a wall calendar you would get as a teenager where it had all of them listed. That's what I picture.

Speaker 12 Oh, nice. So

Speaker 12 what are the monthly

Speaker 12 centerfolds of or the pictures of?

Speaker 15 I don't know, but I guess it would just be four, four, and four.

Speaker 15 Okay. That's how I picture it in my head.
January, February, March, April, and then four more, then four more. In order, because I'm not weird.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Sorry to let you down. Who is that?

Speaker 15 That is Daisy, and Daisy is from Belgium.

Speaker 12 Thanks, Daisy.

Speaker 15 That's the problem.

Speaker 12 She's from Belgium. There's your problem.

Speaker 12 Thanks a lot, Daisy. That was wonderful.

Speaker 12 I feel like also that somebody could make a t-shirt of like 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 t-shirt of all time.

Speaker 12 Totally.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 So if you want to get in touch with us like Daisy did and share your mental whatever, we would love that. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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