Pwn (8 points, to dominate an opponent). Thanx (15 points, thanks). Bezzy (18 points, several meanings, not all of which are printable).
Do these words sound “ridic” (8 points, ridiculous)? Collins, which publishes the official dictionary for the World English-Language Scrabble Players Association, doesn’t think so. All four terms, along with about 6,500 others, are included in its updated list of Official Scrabble Words released last week.
Some of the additions are new because the concepts they describe are fairly new themselves, like “Facetime” (15 points, to speak with someone over video chat using the Facetime application on a phone).
Others, like “bezzy” and “thanx,” are straight up slang. You probably wouldn’t find them in a high school English essay, let alone the Oxford English Dictionary.
But the Collins list includes them anyway, because people use them. And that’s actually kind of radical.
By bestowing official Scrabble legitimacy on “shizzle” and “tweep,” Collins waded into language’s longest-running debate: Should language rules dictate how we speak or reflect it?
On the one side are the prescriptivists, who believe that grammar books and dictionaries determine the “right” way to speak, and everyone should follow suit. A word that’s not in the dictionary isn’t missing — it just shouldn’t be used. Prescriptivists would shudder at “shizzle” (28 points, sure) and turn up their noses at “tweep” (10 points, someone who follows you on Twitter).
Opposing them are people who believe that language rules should be descriptive, that they ought to reflect the way people speak and write. This camp argues that prescriptive language rules stigmatize those who speak differently — for example, people who use African-American Vernacular English. It’s a means of “gatekeeping,” deciding who’s in and who’s out.
Noah Webster, the 19th-century creator and namesake of the tome that haunted you in grade school, would have none of it, according to linguist Rosemarie Ostler.
“Individuals who dictate to a nation the rules of speaking [have] the same imperiousness as a tyrant gives laws to his vassals,” Webster declared in 1789. He believed that fledgling democracy needed a democratic dictionary, one that reflected how Americans actually spoke.
But nearly two centuries later, that idea remained radical. In 1961, the publishers of “Websters Third,” the grandchild of his original dictionary, were excoriated for including casual terms like “ain’t” and “beatnik.”
“They have untuned the string, made a sop of the solid structure of English and encouraged the language to eat up himself,” one New Yorker critic lamented.
Doesn’t sound too different from today’s Scrabble dictionary critics, only now the prescriptivists voice their outrage on Twitter.
Helen Newstead, head of language content at Collins, explained to the BBC that their word list is based on printed evidence of word use. If you can find it written in enough places, they’ll include it. So “grr” (4 points, expressing anger or annoyance), which people type all the time, is in. “Meese” (7 points, plural of “moose”), which I just made up, is not.
At least one person is ready to throw a welcome party: Craig Beevers, reigning Scrabble world champion, thinks the new words are “obvs LOLZ” (9 points, obviously, and 13 points, plural of LOL).
“Words reflect culture, particularly modern culture I’ve honestly never heard of most of the latest additions),” he wrote in an opinion piece for the Guardian.
“Language continues to evolve and so Scrabble and its word bible must keep up too.”
