It’s a momentous day, one that will be remembered for decades, perhaps for all the wrong reasons. It’s the day when Scrabble allowed proper nouns. No longer is it a game of linguistic skill, no longer a way to teach children words and spelling, no longer an excuse to have an oversized vocabulary, now it’s just another hollow reminder of everything that’s wrong with modern life.
To allow proper nouns is a breach of the very ethos of the game, scoring points for lesser used letters, except that they are far more commonly used in proper nouns because of their rarity. Not only that but now any word that can be spelled is potentially allowable if you can name a product, person or place referred to by it. Not only that but Hasbro announced there would be “no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was acceptable”, so no more even adjudication by a dictionary then. Instead we have a malaise of incoherent rules and arguments over how many modern misspellings of names are allowable.
Worse still is the revelation that this has come about to encourage younger people to play the game. Frankly younger people can piss off if they can’t be bothered to use real words, what next, fucking text speak?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8604625.stm
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