Hot for Teacher. Not.

When I moved up from a phone that just let you call people and talk to them to a phone that lets you do all sorts of things and has an operating manual that weighs as much as the front line of the Dallas Cowboys, I discovered that I had broad new horizons for wasting time playing games. There was "Bejeweled Blitz," "Tetris," fifteen kinds of Solitaire ... and my favorite game, Scrabble.

Now, for those of you who may not know about Scrabble, it's a game in which you draw random letters and use them to form words on a board. The letters have various values which reflect how difficult it is to use them (Q's and Z's, for instance, are worth ten points; P's and B's are worth three; and vowels are a measly one point each. You use the tiles to build words on the board, which is dotted with special squares that let you multiply the value of the letters you place on them as you build words ... there are spaces that double and triple the value of the letters you play on them, and other spaces that double and triple the value of the words that cross them. If a word you play crosses or adjoins another word already on the board, any other words that are formed must be legitimate words in the English dictionary. The object is to use all your letters to get the maximum score.

Got all that?

Now, if you use the version of Scrabble that plays on your iPhone or iPad, it contains a special feature called "Teacher." After you have made your play and received your score, if you press the "Teacher" icon, a snarky window pops up to tell you how many more points you might have gotten if you'd played the Teacher's word ... which is usually something that looks as if it came out of a 14th-century Old Church Slavonic dictionary and will net 17,856 points instead of the 6 you finally managed to eke out.

I hate the Teacher.

Another thing you should probably not do if you play Scrabble online is play against a retired English teacher*. Unless your name starts with PhD, you should probably seek a less formidable opponent.

Nevertheless, Scrabble is a fun game, on the kitchen table or on your digital device. If your name doesn't start with PhD and you're looking for someone to play against, send me an e-mail and we'll get it on.

You'll be more fun than the Teacher, and I might have a better chance of making a decent showing.

Have a good day. Build that vocabulary. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Kathy is a wonderful lady and a dear friend, but a ruthless Scrabble competitor.