Scrabble has been dumbed down and I can do no better than the EXCELLENT article in my local newspaper today.
Many a holiday evening has included me trying to think of ways I can avoid playing Scrabble with my wife, who is determined that we shall. Now the negotiations are going to include whether we do it the traditional way or the dumbed down way. On second thoughts, no, I NEVER want to play the idiot version.
For those who can not live without Scrabble, check out this furniture I saw on this arty blog.
Interesting article. I’d say there’s an issue with the “100,000″ words per day that one “consumes”. If you divide that by the 16 hours the average person is awake in a day, that comes to 6,250 words an hour, which divided by 60 comes to 104 words a minute. While it’s perfectly possible to consume 104 words a minute, I’m not sure any of us does on average throughout the day. And even if we do, we certainly don’t use 100,000 *unique* words a day, so to compare this with the 291,500 words in the OED is a little unfair. Though I assume this is in fact 291,500 lemmas (no distinction between “eat”, “eats”, “eating” and “eaten”), and therefore does not include all forms of the same lemma that can be played in Scrabble.
Hi Timothy,
The “100,000 words a day” line was from a university study in San Diego, reported here (among other media): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/living/article6954748.ece
It’s seemingly a combination of all sources – eg if you’re listening to the radio, while perusing the internet, reading and sending text messages etc, it all adds up.