With the redactions, Joe’s list was used by Merriam-Webster in full. This reliance on the work of an unpaid, unseen, amateur lexicographer—albeit a meticulous one—was almost comical. At the end of his list, Joe included examples of foreign words in the OSPD which needed to go. But he stopped at the letter E, with ENFIN* (if anyone had asked, Joe would have supplied the full list), and when the OSPD2 was published, only those words were deleted; foreign words found later in the alphabet lived on. Joe accidentally skipped over the word KVELL, which was in Webster’s New World, and to this day it’s not playable in Scrabble.
“In short,” Joe writes in one of his letters to me, “one could say that OSPD2 ...was almost solely my effort.” He estimates that he spent more than eight thousand hours—four years full-time—working on the lists on which the revised dictionary was based. He never asked Merriam-Webster, the National Scrabble Association, Selchow & Righter, Coleco, or Hasbro for any money. And he never got any at all.
Dictionaries are designed to appear authoritative. They’re thick, sturdy, and precise, with pages of explanatory material and complex notational schemes that create an aura of august finality. People refer to “the dictionary” as if there were just one, divinely inspired, like the Bible, and passed down through the ages.
But dictionaries are as subjective as any other piece of writing. Which words are included in them and which words are removed or ignored are decisions made by lexicographers based on shifting criteria, varying standards, and divergent publishing goals. Dictionaries serve different agendas, contain different numbers of entries, and have different rules. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary —the grand, 2,726-page tome published in 1961 which sparked an outcry for its perceived linguistic permissiveness—contains 450,000 entries. The tenth edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate has 160,000 entries.
What’s considered a word by lexicographic standards? Depends on what you count. Linguists thirty years ago estimated the size of the English lexicon at more than four million words; today it could be double that. For starters, there are millions of chemical compounds and other scientific words. “There are in addition,” Sidney I. Landau wrote in the 1984 book Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography,
nonce words (words coined for a particular occasion), dialectal words, slang, neologisms (new words), exotic words (words introduced from other languages but not yet naturalized), trade names, and words derived from place names, such as The New Yorker [magazine] or Michigander. ...Does one include all obsolete words, and all forms (or spellings) of each of them? If one admits lexical units larger than words, where does one draw the line?...Are proper nouns to be considered words? Are compounds like pull toy?
Noah Webster’s two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828, was the first great American dictionary. It contained seventy thousand entries—twelve thousand more than in any earlier word source—including for the first time in a reference work commonly used nouns such as glacier and malpractice, verbs such as electioneer and revolutionize, and at least one neologism, jeopardize. Webster said that “the business of the lexicographer is to collect, arrange, and define, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language, and leave the author to select from them at his pleasure and according to his own taste and judgment.” Or, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Dictionaries are but depositories of words already legitimated by usage.”
But lexicographers don’t always agree, and everyone considers himself a lexicographer. That’s why the OSPD and the OWL —the Official Tournament and Club Word List, the volume that simply lists the acceptable words, sans definitions—arouse more passion than any other aspect of Scrabble. As with any dictionary, the main argument is over what should and shouldn’t be in these books. Marlon Hill thinks there are too many spellings of words such as WADMAL (five), WRESTLE (six), and GANEF (eight). “Pick one,” Marlon says, ignoring the fact that alternate spellings are based on citations in common usage found by lexicographers. Others have fought over the years for the exclusion of words labeled foreign; some of these (DA*, DES*, VIN*, VON*) were removed from Scrabble when the OWL was adopted in 1998, some were not (AMI, DE, JEU).
Dan Pratt, a mathematician with the Department of Defense, quit the NSA’s dictionary committee, and tournament Scrabble, partly because the last dictionary revision didn’t go far enough. Pratt refused to talk to me about the OSPD because, he said, he was too frustrated to rehash his battles. But he wrote an article for the word journal Verbatim in 1999 in which he bemoaned inconsistencies in the OSPD derived from the fact that it’s an agglomeration of words from a bunch of dictionaries, some of which are out of date. He suggested a sweeping word putsch.
“If future word-game dictionaries accepted only words appearing in two standard reference works, we would have a stabler dictionary environment that might please both the word lovers and the pros,” Pratt wrote, “and perhaps we could even consider weeding out many of the words that no longer appear in any readily available reference, and maybe even the most suspect of those vouched for only by one.”
Most experts aren’t such strict constructionists. They are curious about the source and history of the words they play, and even critical of the legitimacy of some words. But they accept that the Scrabble “dictionary” isn’t really a dictionary at all. It’s a book designed to keep players from spending all of their time fighting over what’s a word. “People keep confusing dictionaries with a narrowly defined word list to be used as a prop for a game,” a Canadian expert named Albert Hahn posted to CGP.
The entries in the OSPD include only part of speech labels, inflections, and truncated definitions; no pronunciations or etymologies. And the definitions can’t always be trusted. Scrabble players love to joke about the OSPD definition of TUP: “to copulate with a ewe.” Hahn thought it was funny, too, and wondered whether this act was so prevalent that it needed its own word. That was until he looked up the word in an actual dictionary. It means to screw a sheep, all right, “but it refers to the ram,” Hahn wrote.
If the OSPD were a full-fledged dictionary, or the OWL were a word list based on usage, it would be updated more frequently. Since publication of the OWL, there have been three new printings of the tenth edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, adding dozens of new words. They include such now-familiar terms as BREWPUB, CINEPLEX, MESCLUN, MINIBAR, MORPHED, MOSH, SPAM, and ECHINACEA, not to mention a bunch of new currencies from Eastern Europe and elsewhere which would be fabulous short Scrabble words. But those words need asterisks on this page. They can’t be used in the game yet.
The times when the Scrabble dictionary has been updated, it hasn’t been cleansed. More than a thousand words were added in the two most recent revisions, but only a handful were deleted. Meanwhile, there are words in the OSPD that can’t be found in any standard college dictionary currently in print. They’ve survived just because they’re there.
Take the word AL. It’s an East Indian tree, according to the OSPD, which defines AAL slightly differently, as an East Indian shrub. AL appeared in The Random House College Dictionary “at just the wrong time for OSPD purposes,” Dan Pratt wrote in Verbatim, “since it now will live, apparently forever, even though the current edition of Random House and all of its competitors omit this extremely obscure rarity.” But while AL and AAL survive, those words that Joe Leonard found in Funk & Wagnalls that had been skipped during the creation of the original OSPD never had a chance to live on in infamy.
The Scrabble dictionary did receive one purging, but it wasn’t the one the players wanted.
In late 1993, a Virginia art gallery owner named Judith Grad was having lunch with two elderly Jewish friends. The conversation turned to the couple’s passion for Scrabble. And when they pulled out their OSPD and showed Grad the word JEW—defined as “to bargain with—an offensive term”—she was horrified.
Grad looked up other words—KIKE, HEBE, YID, NIGGER, DAGO, SPIC. “I was livid,” Grad told a local ne
wspaper. “It’s a game. Those words have no business in a dictionary used to support a game.” She started writing letters, first to Merriam-Webster and Hasbro’s game division, Milton Bradley. She didn’t like the responses.
“It is certainly not the intent of the dictionary to perpetuate racial or ethnic slurs or to make such usages respectable,” Merriam-Webster’s editor in chief, Frederick C. Mish, wrote. “However, such slurs are part of the language and reputable dictionaries record them as such.”
“As a dictionary, it is a reflection of words currently used in our language,” Milton Bradley President Dave Wilson told her. “It is important to note that Milton Bradley Co. does not condone the use of these words, nor do we advocate the use of offensive terms. If it were up to us, none of these words—nor the sentiments behind them—would exist at all.”
Grad wasn’t satisfied. She contacted the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Zionists Organization of America. Nothing. Finally, the National Council of Jewish Women began a letter-writing campaign, which attracted some attention in the Jewish media, and the Anti-Defamation League picked up the baton anew. The ADL wrote to Hasbro Chairman Alan Hassenfeld. It accused Hasbro of “literally playing games with hate” and urged that “hateful and demeaning epithets be retired.”
Growing up, Hassenfeld had played Scrabble with his mother, Sylvia. “Words that were critical of people—those were absolutely out,” Hassenfeld tells me. “You’d have your mouth washed out, and choking on soap bubbles you’d come back in. No. No dirty words.” Without consulting Merriam-Webster or the National Scrabble Association, Hassenfeld acceded to the ADL’s demand: The company announced that fifty to one hundred “offensive” words would be removed from the OSPD.
The Scrabble community went ballistic. A handful of players, notably some devout Christians, backed the decision. But a huge majority, led by a number of Jewish players, accused Hasbro of censorship. Words are words, and banning them from a dictionary would not make them go away, they argued. Plus, the players tried to explain, the words as played on a board during a game of Scrabble are without meaning. In the limited context of scoring points, the meaning of HONKIE, deemed offensive in the OSPD, is no more relevant than the meaning of any obscure but commonly played word. Jewish players unblinkingly play YID, and African Americans won’t hesitate to play NIGGERS if it’s the correct strategic move. (Outside the playing room, of course, the words have context. DARKIES showed up in a final game of the 1990 Nationals, but it was changed to DARKENS when the board was displayed on Good Morning America the next day.)
Hilda Siegel, a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and a member of the National Council of Jewish Women, organized an anti-expurgation petition drive that produced nearly eight hundred signatures from players in thirty-five states. “There are huge numbers of words which may be offensive to one or another individual or group,” the petition read. “However, a book purporting to be a dictionary cannot pretend that those words do not exist.” Players threatened to quit the NSA, boycott tournaments, and even sue if the words were excised. John Williams received hate mail and threats at the NSA offices.
Meanwhile, though, Williams had to help compile the list of words to be eliminated. Hasbro executives jumped on the political-correctness bandwagon, which didn’t make the task any easier. “I have concerns about some of these words,” Williams recalls a senior Hasbro executive telling him. “BLOWJOB? Am I to believe that this is good in Scrabble?” TUP appeared on a list of potential deletions prepared by the corporate owners until Williams pointed out that it was about the ram, “not two farm boys.”
Williams heard from the head of a Romany group representing Gypsy interests who demanded that the verb GYP be delisted (it wasn’t). One letter asked whether CRIPPLE (no) and WETBACK (yes) would be purged. Another writer declared that he found GUN and WAR to be the two most offensive words in the English language and (facetiously, one hopes) demanded that they be removed. “Don’t surrender to the language police,” said another.
The list, which was never made public (though Scrabble players deduced its contents), contained a total of 206 deletions, the root word, plurals, inflections, and alternate spellings of about seventy different terms. Most of the words were predictable—profanities, ethnic slurs, slang terms. Then there were a few absurdities: FART, LIBBER, FATSO, JESUIT, PAPIST, PISS, and TURD. BADASS and PISSER were kicked out despite lacking the dictionary label “offensive” or “vulgar.”
“Being offended is so subjective, it’s ludicrous,” Williams said in one of the scores of interviews he conducted. “But we’re trying to take an academic approach.”
It was a battle between censorship and sensitivity. Hasbro told Williams not to utter any of the banned words in interviews. He felt as if he was being forced to defend an indefensible position. On the one hand, Scrabble was a proprietary game and Hasbro had the right to protect its corporate image and interests; it owned the Scrabble dictionary, which of course wasn’t an actual dictionary but a tool used to play its game. On the other hand, Williams was a player himself who understood that removing words from the dictionary on other than lexicographic grounds was just wrong; it didn’t make the words disappear.
So behind the scenes he tried to negotiate a compromise: two books, one for the general public, one for the competitive players. But some top players didn’t trust that it would happen. So there was blood in the water at the Nationals in the summer of 1994. More than two hundred players streamed into a ballroom at the Universal Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles wearing T-shirts protesting the expurgation and waving placards demanding that it be reversed. Minutes before addressing the crowd, Williams called Dave Wilson at Hasbro. Then he made a triumphal announcement: “The words are ours,” he said.
Hasbro agreed to publish the two dictionaries. The one sold in bookstores, the OSPD3, would carry the label “for recreational and school play” and exclude the so-called offensive terms. A separate list, including the deleted words and eschewing definitions entirely, would be printed for use in clubs and tournaments. The players cheered.
In 1988, Joe Edley received one of Joe Leonard’s lists of words for possible inclusion in the planned OSPD2. The words were typed straight across the page with just a couple of spaces between each one, so Edley asked a member of the NSA’s dictionary committee, a longtime player and club director in Portland, Oregon, Karen Merrill, to retype the list in columns.
A short piece about Merrill, written by Edley under the headline “Club Spotlight: A Leader in the Northwest,” appeared in the Scrabble newsletter two years later. The fourth paragraph of seven read, “Karen was also instrumental in helping move forward the publishing date of the revised OSPD, which currently is some time in 1991. She joined the Dictionary Committee in 1988 and helped put the new word list into readable form for Merriam-Webster to edit.”
Joe Leonard had yet to be acknowledged for his work. Edley had written him saying that he understood Leonard couldn’t accept money for his efforts (which Leonard says wasn’t true), but that the Scrabble Association would seek to compensate him some other way. (Edley says he was planning to offer Leonard a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and to write a story about him in the newsletter.) Leonard asked for a lifetime membership in the association, reimbursement for the cost of the source dictionaries he had purchased, and at least two copies of the OSPD2. He never heard back from Edley because of what happened next.
Shortly after the article about her appeared in the Scrabble newsletter, Karen Merrill received an angry letter from Joe Leonard. He was upset that she had received credit for work on the new dictionary while he had not. By that time, Leonard’s final, forty-four-page master list had been passed on to Merriam-Webster, which relied on it almost exclusively in preparing the OSPD2. Merrill forwarded the letter to the NSA, and Edley told Leonard he owed her an apology. Edley said Leonard would receive credit for his work “when the time is ap
propriate.”
Merrill then began receiving obscene and threatening postcards written in what appears to be Leonard’s precise handwriting or typed on a manual typewriter. Merrill says the postcards, some of which bear Joe’s signature, arrived every few weeks for about a year. Then they stopped, and Merrill says she received a second apology from Leonard. (Joe never admits to me that he wrote the postcards, but he never explicitly denies it either.) On the advice of Hasbro attorneys and U.S. postal authorities, John Williams revoked Leonard’s membership in the Scrabble Association. The OSPD2 was published in 1991, but Leonard was neither credited nor compensated.
Despite the imbroglio, Joe kept researching words. When Hasbro ordered the expurgation of the allegedly dirty words a few years later, the NSA had a chance to revise the dictionary anew. Players compiled a list of about a thousand words from the tenth edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate. Joe, naturally, found about 160 additional words missed by those who did the searching, from ADZUKI (which was listed under the entry for “adzuki bean”) to YUPS (a plural of the noun YUPPIE). He found but didn’t include BOFFED and BOFFING on his list because of the expurgation debate, and they'remain unplayable even though they are in Merriam-Webster’s.
I ask Joe why he kept searching for new words even though he was persona non grata with the NSA. He says in a letter that the list “was doing me absolutely no good just being here in the apartment, totally done in pencil. So I thought once again, ‘Why not share it, so that all others who use what would be OWL can also benefit from it.’ And so I did. I just figured the players of the game deserved to have those additional words.”
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 18
