The Strangeness of Words
Word games are a huge and entertaining category of pasttimes. Whether it's Scrabble, Words with Friends, Word Collect, Boggle, or any of hundreds of other board games and apps, there is one underlying issue with them all ... the strangeness of the dictionaries. Which words are accepted by which dictionaries? And why? What exactly makes a word a part of the "English language", or your native language. It's not just the words commonly used, a good dictionary goes way beyond that, but then every dictionary has some head-scratching inclusions and exclusions. I have played a lot of Scrabble over the years, including one tournament at the local library. Arguments break out so frequently over some lesser-known words, and how many times have we reached for a dictionary only to find that the word we've used so many times isn't a thing after all? Or, gloated over showing that a word like "anion" is real? When I started in college, back at SUNY Stony Broo