Scrabble

I suck at scrabble. The other night I suggested that Brandi and I play because I was tired of watching TV. It had been a while and I do not think I have ever defeated her at the game, but if I remembered correctly the last game was surprisingly close so I took my chances. My Scrabble woes are multi faceted. Firstly I am a poor speller. I feel like I am getting better but when I was in the midst of my foreign language studies I could hardly construct an English word properly. This stems from the fact that I was learning to write in other languages, and the fact that Slavic and especially Serbian has an alphabet wherein every letter makes only one sound. It is brilliant really and if there was a vote today on switching to Serbian as a primary language I would vote yeah. I can't stand the letter C for instance. C is the most irrelevant letter in our alphabet in my estimation. It makes either an S or a K sound. When combined with other letters it manages a new sound like CH but we could make a new letter for that sound, or adopt (as in the case of Serbian) C for the CH sound. I digress.

My other problem with Scrabble is that I am creative. When I get a word in my head (and I am apt to create large words) I find a way to make it work. A creative way. I will scramble letters until I find a way to make a word that I want. It may be by dropping a double consonant, or by changing vowels so that the word still sounds the same phonetically. To me that is all I want. I want the word to sound the same, even if it is not technically correct. Brandi disagrees. She insists that I spell the word correct or she penalizes me and makes me remove my word. Harsh I know. So after the third word I had rejected, I gave up, threw a bit of a tantrum and called quit. It was disgraceful really. I should have done the right thing, continued to play even though I was getting smashed, and taken the loss like a man, but I overreacted when my third word was revealed to be a non-word. All my frustration came to a head when I was trying to spell the word ghost. When I typed it just now I had no problem spelling it, but on my board I did not have an "h". So I tried to improvise by spelling it goest. Why not? It sounds right. Ultimately I knew that it was incorrect and Brandi was nice enough to confirm that before I embarrassed myself further by trying to lay goest down as a word. So then I tried to throw down the word geist as in poltergeist. I accidentally switched the center letters however spelling giest, which brought an objection from Brandi. I lost it. At now my third incorrect word I could not handle it and quit after a bit of a tirade. I admit it was childish.

So, I suck at Scrabble. Next time I am going to suggest Monopoly. Now that is a game.