Liberal Talk Radio

At the risk of sounding stodgy, there’s something perverse about playing and winning Scrabble without understanding what the words mean:

In the end, the zobo and the ogive could not quite triumph over the qanat and the euripi on Sunday, and thus the contender was birsled – Scottish dialect for scorched or toasted.

It was with such linguistic acrobatics that the eighth World Scrabble Championships came to an end in a north London hotel, when Adam Logan, a 30-year-old mathematician from Canada, scored 465 points to beat Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, a 30-year-old architect from Thailand, with 426 points in the final game of a playoff.

Over four days of triple-letter scores and usages involving q’s without u’s, like qanat, and qi, it had been a time of abstruse words, canny tactics and high tension for 102 contenders from more than 40 countries from Australia to Zambia, including the United States. It was a time, too, when language divorced itself from meaning in the competition for the $15,000 winner’s prize.

“For the purpose of the game, the meaning of the word is not important,” said Leslie Charles, the national champion of Trinidad and Tobago, who sat in a hotel ballroom where the final best-of-five playoff was relayed on wide television screens from a smaller room where the two players were closeted with their racks, tiles and 25-minute timer clocks.

Just to be clear, I point out this coarsening influence on our modern world as someone who has spent more than his share of time trying to memorize the approved list of two-letter words. But that said, I’m ready to argue that this sort of overly legalistic Scrabblism may cross a line:

But in the game, all that counts is whether words figure on a list of the official compendium of legitimate words. (There are over 108,553 acceptable words with up to eight characters – just for starters, according to the contest organizers.)

Indeed, the previous champion, Panupol Sujjayakorn, a 21-year-old Thai university student, was said to have won two years ago with an encyclopedic memory of the list but without a broad knowledge of spoken English.

“If it’s in the book and it has a meaning, it’s acceptable,” Mr. Charles said.

So the question is, Which means more to you — the spirit of the law or the letter of the law? And is there a corresponding ideological view of the world that follows this Scrabble Litmus Test? (That’s not rhetorical! I think we’re on to something here!)

So, Judge Alito, what do you think? (And is this somehow less relevant than asking about one’s favorite films?)