True story. I watched some people playing scrabble in Alabama a while back. Actually I was sort of in the game. Sort of. In presence only. I'm no genius (by any stretch of the word) but this particular match made me look like a Quantum Physicists. One woman successfully used the word “caah” as in “the sound a crow makes”. My eyeballs almost popped out of my head and I bit my tongue until I almost passed out. She had the first turn of the game and used this word as her opener. What a great use of the letters a,a,c and h. I thought she might have scored more with either haac or acah but it seemed to work out ok. Ok, after this bold move nobody else in the game flinched or said anything and the next guy went. I think he made maybe “cat” or “hat” using a letter from the first gem. For some reason all I could think to say was “Wow, that’s an onomatopoeia”, which evoked the same sullen stares that the zombies had on the dawn of the dead. Subsequent turns were taken with players randomly placing letters tiles which sort of spelled words in one direction but totally butched the crossing words. The board soon looked like some kind of cryptic hieroglyphic that would require some kind of Navaho code breaker to understand. After someone wasted a triple word score space with the ever popular nine point game-breaker “sit” everyone gave a genuine “good job” and returned to the memorized look of intensity over their six tiles (as no one ever could seem to figure out how many tiles to draw after each turn to equal seven total). A second player used the word “mange” which she pronounced “main-gee, like when you don’t comb your hair” and “pose, like what those rap guys call their home-boys”. There was a “French” word used and also the word “ovo” which was described as a medical term relating to eggs and ovulating. Incredibly enough, this actually is part of the Latin word “ad ovo” which means “from the egg”. Retrospectively this was sort of like the Alice Cooper moment on Wayne’s World when he explained the Algonquian meaning of the word “Milwaukee” or like when the Scarecrow with no brains on the Wizard of Oz starting spitting out complex mathematical formulas. For a moment I thought I was being punk’d and Ashton would step out and start jumping around with his goofy grin and stupid sideways trucker hat.

I was secretly hoping someone would accidentally drop their tiles when they were drawing new ones over the board and a legible, real word would magically form as the fell, or that the letters would start moving around by themselves like a Jumanji board and make spell out some kind of noun. As I constantly heard the players saying “I can’t spell anything with these dumb letters” I moved around the board behind them and looked at the little wooden racks that held the tiles. I discovered that all of them had the letters I,G,N,O,R,A and N which they could have added to several T’s that were in stand alone spots on the board and gotten double word, triple letter and fifty bonus points for using all seven letters. Ok, I you know I made that part up because I already said that none of them ever had all seven tiles except for the first turn and I think even then one of the started with five.

I waited in anticipation for the defining moment of cluelessness when one of them drew out one of the two blank tiles and turned it over maybe eleven times in their fingers with each rotation looking for the imprinted letter. It went down just as my mind advertised. The look on the guy’s face was like a chimp trying to figure out how to open a child proof medicine bottle. Frustrated but intrigued. I was strangely satisfied when this happened. I guess because I had internally “called it”. The scoring was a fiasco as no one was sure exactly which letters you got credit for and if you got credited with every tile remotely connected to the ones you put down or not. Any given word play could have been worth either seven and a half or forty points. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and stealthily slipped away like a ninja trying to avoid the subject of why I didn’t want to watch this un-spelling bee. These guys were lucky that Forest Gump or the dad from “I am Sam” wasn’t playing or they would have gotten their collective rear ends grammatically spanked.

OK, these people looked to have had a couple of beers apiece. Maybe. But no one is drunk enough to think “Caah” is really a word. As Momma always said “Stupid is as stupid does”. You tell ‘em Momma.

[a 3 letter english wording meaning adios],
Kevin