Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
Speaker 2: should Know, good old fashioned pop culture games edition. Yeah
Speaker 2: and yeah, here we are finally talking about scrabble. I've
Speaker 2: been asking for you to do this with me for
Speaker 2: at least a decade, and you kept refusing. I still
Speaker 2: don't know why. Even Jerry chimed in and was like,
Speaker 2: will you guys please do scrabble, and finally you relented.
Speaker 2: I think just because you wanted me and Jerry to
Speaker 2: stop bothering you about it.
Speaker 3: No, it's probably it. A big thanks to Laura for
Speaker 3: her help on this one.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: What was your nickname for her?
Speaker 2: Doctor Claw?
Speaker 3: Doctor Claw? Do you play scrabble? Are you a scrabbler?
Speaker 3: I just kind of wanted to get that out of
Speaker 3: the way.
Speaker 2: You know, I wish I were. I'm not, And it's
Speaker 2: not like I have an aversion to it or anything
Speaker 2: like that. It's just not part of my world. I guess,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, same, I mean we own it, and I have
Speaker 3: played scrabble here and there. If somebody's like, hey, let's
Speaker 3: play scrabble. I won't go like, no, sorry, I'm not
Speaker 3: going to do it right, but you know, I'll play
Speaker 3: very occasionally, but I've never been a regular scrabbler, nor
Speaker 3: am I very good at it at all, especially if
Speaker 3: I'm playing against somebody who you know, because there's a
Speaker 3: lot more to it than just like knowing words.
Speaker 2: Well, I feel like based on stuff you should know history.
Speaker 2: Our best episodes are ones where we explain games that
Speaker 2: we don't actually play. Soccer, chess, yeah, I mean the
Speaker 2: list just keeps going on. It feels like we're about
Speaker 2: to add to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, surfing, yes, surfing. I mean we should probably just
Speaker 3: say that scrabble if you don't know, it's a board
Speaker 3: game in which two to four players use letters little
Speaker 3: tiles to spell out words on a board and a
Speaker 3: crossword fashion.
Speaker 2: Wow, that was a good description.
Speaker 3: In other words, you know, the words have to intersect
Speaker 3: each other. You can't just throw a random word out
Speaker 3: there in the corner if you feel like it. They
Speaker 3: have to touch and use a letter or I guess
Speaker 3: a blank space for another word.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And by the way, I just want to go ahead,
Speaker 3: and because scrabble people are probably going to get mad
Speaker 3: at us. But I'm going to go ahead and throw
Speaker 3: a suggestive rule change. Okay, that there is a word scrabble,
Speaker 3: and that means to as a verb, to scratch or grope,
Speaker 3: to try and collect something, or as a now in
Speaker 3: the act of doing that. And I propose that if
Speaker 3: you play that eight letter word, that not only do
Speaker 3: you get your bingo bonus for playing a seven letter word,
Speaker 3: I think you should if you play the word scrabble,
Speaker 3: you should get an extra bonus on.
Speaker 2: Top of it of how many points million.
Speaker 3: Whatever's fair. That's where I just step back and say,
Speaker 3: you guys, handle it.
Speaker 2: Okay, you like to kick the hornet's nest and then
Speaker 2: watch them go.
Speaker 3: I just think I don't know, if you play the
Speaker 3: word scrab I will give it a little, just a
Speaker 3: little bump.
Speaker 2: I agree. I think you're right right.
Speaker 3: That's my only suggestion, my only note.
Speaker 2: A little more about it. The scrabble board is fifteen
Speaker 2: by fifteen squares twenty five two hundred and twenty five
Speaker 2: total squares. And because it's fifteen by fifteen, you're limited
Speaker 2: to no more than fifteen letter words.
Speaker 3: Sure, and.
Speaker 2: I guess just a quick summary of the rules so
Speaker 2: when you play that first word, you have to play
Speaker 2: it in the center square. That's where you start, and
Speaker 2: you can build off of other people's words. You get
Speaker 2: up to fifteen letter words by building onto other words,
Speaker 2: because you could never spell more than a seven letter word,
Speaker 2: because at no point in time do you ever have
Speaker 2: more than seven tiles.
Speaker 3: Right, And as I said that seven tiles played it
Speaker 3: once is called the bingo. You add up your score
Speaker 3: at the end and tack on fifty points at that point, right,
Speaker 3: or however many you get. Apparently experts can play like,
Speaker 3: you know, three, four or five of those in a
Speaker 3: game sometimes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, that's a great way to run up
Speaker 2: scores from what I can tell. And then across the
Speaker 2: board there's triple word scores, double word scores, double letter scores,
Speaker 2: and triple letter scores. And basically when you lay a
Speaker 2: tile over that, depending on whether it's a letter or
Speaker 2: a word, you get bonus points for it. So when
Speaker 2: you're like, like, if you play a bingo across like
Speaker 2: a triple word score cooking, you got a bunch of points.
Speaker 2: You basically just dusted your opponent in that one move.
Speaker 3: Essentially, Yeah, I mean, if you're just sort of amateur
Speaker 3: funzies scrabble people, one big bingo like that can seal
Speaker 3: the game for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm called sending a packing with tears in their eyes.
Speaker 3: I think in France, by the way, the bingo is
Speaker 3: called a scrabble just other nuts and bolts. You know.
Speaker 3: The tiles come in a little their little wooden tiles,
Speaker 3: little wooden square tiles, and on the tile is a
Speaker 3: letter and then a point value sort of as a
Speaker 3: sub script. And then you keep your letters on a
Speaker 3: little wooden tile rack. And ideally your opponent does not
Speaker 3: see those like you know, it's they're facing away from
Speaker 3: you if you're opposite your opponent. And that's a big
Speaker 3: part of like an expert, or at least an accomplished
Speaker 3: or experienced scrabbleist is dummies like me and I guess you.
Speaker 3: If you and I played, we just sit down and
Speaker 3: try and spilt fart every chance we got. If you're
Speaker 3: an experienced scrabblist, you're almost like counting cards, like you
Speaker 3: know how many letters are in the bag of like
Speaker 3: how many of each letter in the bag, and you
Speaker 3: see them being played, you know how many are on
Speaker 3: your rack? You know how many are still in the pile,
Speaker 3: so you're sort of trying to figure out mathematical possibilities
Speaker 3: of what's still out there and what can be played,
Speaker 3: Like that's the next level stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And it's not like evenly distributed. For example,
Speaker 2: there's twelve e's, but there's only one J, K, Q,
Speaker 2: X and Z, and then the other letters there is
Speaker 2: kind of distributed in weird random ways, so that like
Speaker 2: you could, I guess easily count that stuff. If you
Speaker 2: play scrabble enough, you're just going to pick up on
Speaker 2: how many are out there at any given point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you've also got your blank tiles, which are worth
Speaker 3: zero points, but that those really help out in making
Speaker 3: words possible that you couldn't get ordinarily m hmm. And
Speaker 3: then you've got your one pointers A E, I, L, N, O,
Speaker 3: R S T and you.
Speaker 2: And also just real quick, I did some poking around, Chuck,
Speaker 2: and I found that there's some mnemonic devices that like
Speaker 2: tournament level players use to remember how many points a
Speaker 2: particular letter gets.
Speaker 3: You should say that after I list them all.
Speaker 2: Well, I was I was going to just do it
Speaker 2: by by group, if that's okay with you. Sure, So
Speaker 2: the first group one point they use astronauts eat in limbo. No, right,
Speaker 2: silly tiger umbrella.
Speaker 3: All right. The two pointers are DNG, Dave and Gary. Okay,
Speaker 3: I would say dog gone. Three points are BCM and
Speaker 3: p H.
Speaker 2: That is be chewing and masticating pizza.
Speaker 3: Does someone really suggests like, hey, use these and don't.
Speaker 2: Make up your own No, I'm making this up.
Speaker 3: I gotcha. This is all a bit. Okay, four points
Speaker 3: we got fh VNW and why right?
Speaker 2: So for Heaven's vake? Why you Okay?
Speaker 3: I get it now. You should have told me this
Speaker 3: is a bit. Five pointers, you get your k okay, okay, eight.
Speaker 2: Pointers jn X Jackson loves and.
Speaker 3: X okay Jackson loves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just have to ignore the the l okay.
Speaker 3: Then your ten pointer Josh, what are you gonna end
Speaker 3: up with?
Speaker 2: Q and Z quarts and quartz?
Speaker 3: That's great? I think I got it.
Speaker 2: You got it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, give me a quiz in the end. I'll put
Speaker 3: this away and then you can just quizz me.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Once you learn that, you'll never forget it.
Speaker 3: There is a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon Andrew Thomas,
Speaker 3: who says, if you go first, you have an advantage
Speaker 3: of fourteen points. If you have that blank tile. Ever
Speaker 3: in the game, that's an advantage of thirty points if
Speaker 3: you're good at scrabble, not like me.
Speaker 2: Right, there's also like, if you have S tiles, there's
Speaker 2: a ten point advantage. And the reason why I was
Speaker 2: like that doesn't make any sense because S, as you
Speaker 2: remember from your mnemonic device, is only a one point tile.
Speaker 2: You should throw that on the end though, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's the thing. So like if you add if you,
Speaker 2: like I said, you can add on to other words
Speaker 2: that are already on the board, even once another player
Speaker 2: wrote out and whatever word score they got for that word,
Speaker 2: if you add an S, you get that same word
Speaker 2: score plus one point for the ass. So that's a
Speaker 2: really easy way to rack up some quick points and
Speaker 2: totally I think also probably annoy other players.
Speaker 3: I wonder about that. I'd like to hear from from scrabblers.
Speaker 3: I mean, if it's fair game, it's fair game.
Speaker 2: Yes, and there's but there's plenty of rules that are
Speaker 2: fair game that are also like you're a jackass.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good point. Let me see here, what
Speaker 3: else do we have? We have X and Z give
Speaker 3: you a three to five point advantage even though they're
Speaker 3: you know, tougher to use, and the Q is a
Speaker 3: five point disadvantage because I mean, I was about to say,
Speaker 3: you always have to have that U. But I'm sure
Speaker 3: there are weird scrabble words that don't have a QU.
Speaker 2: There's two that I know of.
Speaker 3: One is key qi. Yeah, I think I heard of
Speaker 3: uy or.
Speaker 2: No, sorry, that's chi life force. I think, okay, and
Speaker 2: you get eleven points for that one, and then I
Speaker 2: can't remember. There's one more that's like a Q word
Speaker 2: that doesn't not require a U. Oh.
Speaker 3: No, Qi is in here because that's the highest scoring
Speaker 3: two letter word along with za. Is that what you said?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I looked up za za Yeah, and it's
Speaker 2: slang for pizza. I'm not certain that that usage is allowed.
Speaker 2: But it's also an archaic word for a B flat notation. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I wonder if because I did the same thing you
Speaker 3: did every time they gave it a Laura found an
Speaker 3: example of a word that's unusual or high scoring. I
Speaker 3: always looked it up because I was curious. I wonder
Speaker 3: if that's part of the love of scrabble, is actually
Speaker 3: learning what these words mean or they're like I really
Speaker 3: don't care. I just care how much it's worth.
Speaker 2: Well, from what I can tell, scrabble players don't care
Speaker 2: what a word means. They don't think of them like that.
Speaker 2: And I mean they'll come up later with those controversial words.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, yeah, point, Yeah, it's just us. We're curious types.
Speaker 2: Grabble players are not.
Speaker 3: That's that's true. The highest scoring three letter word is
Speaker 3: Zach's nineteen pointer, and zek is sixteen is a four
Speaker 3: letter word worth the most at twenty two.
Speaker 2: That means like a test of sorts.
Speaker 3: Okay, and then zippy what does that mean?
Speaker 2: The pinhead?
Speaker 3: Zippy the pinhead? What's that?
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a really weird eighties comic strip, you know,
Speaker 2: the clown with the Zippy the pinhead.
Speaker 3: No, I don't know it.
Speaker 2: You should look it up. It's it's weird. It's a
Speaker 2: weird comic strip.
Speaker 3: Okay, I don't know it.
Speaker 1: But it couldn't be that.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I have to correct myself before all of the
Speaker 2: scrabble players email in. It couldn't be Zippy the pinhead
Speaker 2: because Zippy the pinhead would be a proper noun.
Speaker 3: Ah. Okay, good point. Things you can't use proper nouns.
Speaker 2: No, you can't.
Speaker 3: Might as well go ahead and say.
Speaker 2: That they're really serious about that stuff too.
Speaker 3: No, I bet. See, I'm a house rules guy, so
Speaker 3: I can you know, as long as everyone's on board,
Speaker 3: I think you can. You can have your own house
Speaker 3: rules first. Oh, I agree, don't bring that into a tournament.
Speaker 2: No, get that mess out of here, is what they'll
Speaker 2: tell you. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But like if I were to play with Ruby, she'd
Speaker 3: and I'd probably say like, hey, we can use propernouns
Speaker 3: because she'll want to put our dog's name or something,
Speaker 3: or maybe I would, right. I did look up the
Speaker 3: highest scoring bingo, and that is musjiks m u z
Speaker 3: j i k s, which is a Russian peasant. Wow,
Speaker 3: well that's probably it's probably Moujiku's or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like it both ways, though musjis. Look at
Speaker 2: all the muzzjiks toiling in the fields.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2: So I was confused because there's a lot of like
Speaker 2: one of the rules is no proper nouns, no words
Speaker 2: that end an apostrophe or require an apostrophe. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: then also no foreign words. But clearly some foreign words
Speaker 2: are allowed in because they're so common in English that
Speaker 2: they've just basically been adopted into the language. I get that,
Speaker 2: but a musjis is not a common word in English,
Speaker 2: so it must mean that that does appear in some
Speaker 2: English dictionary somewhere, because that's kind of the great ruler arbiter.
Speaker 2: But I just don't see how it could be. That's
Speaker 2: just weird to me.
Speaker 3: Well, what's weird is your college band I know for
Speaker 3: a fact was Jake Clark and the Muschicks.
Speaker 2: Yes, but we were trying to be exotic, you know.
Speaker 3: And we should also say that scrabble, I think, is
Speaker 3: now up to thirty languages all over the world, and
Speaker 3: apparently that can be problematic, like in France you can
Speaker 3: add an e and an S to many many words,
Speaker 3: so it can kind of get out of hand with
Speaker 3: the score totals. There. And our beloved Germany, and I
Speaker 3: never really thought about this, but German words are long,
Speaker 3: so there's not a lot of I mean, they're sure. Sure,
Speaker 3: there are obviously words shorter than seven words in Germany,
Speaker 3: but a lot less than a lot of other languages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true, So it must.
Speaker 3: Just be Bingo City or whatever Bingo city is in German.
Speaker 2: There's also Bingo. I don't know what city, Bingo b Shot,
Speaker 2: maybe Bingo Stock. Sure, there's a so in some other
Speaker 2: countries too. In foreign language versions of Scrabble, there are
Speaker 2: some adjustments with the tiles, like some have more than
Speaker 2: one hundred tiles.
Speaker 3: Oh right, because of weird little letters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's like double L and double R. In the
Speaker 2: Spanish language version. There's also the N with the till
Speaker 2: day over it that that's also a tile. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think that's worth eight points. Nice, Yeah, but you have
Speaker 2: to to remember that that's eight points. You have to say. Nice.
Speaker 3: Right. Should we take a break? I like how this
Speaker 3: is headed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 3: I want to learn about a terror sort of college dactyl,
Speaker 3: how to take an that's a little.
Speaker 1: Word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3: All right, we're back. And if you're gonna talk about scrabble,
Speaker 3: you got to talk about Alfred Mosher Butts because he
Speaker 3: is the gentleman who invented this game. This is in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty eight. He was an unemployed architect at the
Speaker 3: time and just into games. He's from Poughkeepsie. But I
Speaker 3: believe the game was actually invented Actually I know this
Speaker 3: for a fact in Jackson Heights Queen's because at eighty
Speaker 3: first Street and thirty fifth Avenue, I believe is a
Speaker 3: scrabble style street sign. I think it's. I think it's
Speaker 3: thirty fifth Avenue has below each of the letters just
Speaker 3: the little number value subscript, which is kind of just
Speaker 3: a little nice, fun, cute nod.
Speaker 2: Are you sure it's just that that community in particular
Speaker 2: isn't big scrabble fans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm positive.
Speaker 1: Okay, So he.
Speaker 2: Did you say he was an unemployed architect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at the time, and he was just into gaming
Speaker 3: and wanted to invent a game that was part chance,
Speaker 3: part skill.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he did not have a great success with
Speaker 2: it out of the gate. He initially tried to call
Speaker 2: it Lexico and criss crosswords, and he took it around
Speaker 2: to game manufacturers and they were like, nah, I'm not
Speaker 2: really feeling this. Yeah, And that was the way it
Speaker 2: went for a good decade before a man named James
Speaker 2: Bruno bought the rights. He saw something in it that
Speaker 2: I guess other people didn't. He renamed it Scrabble. He
Speaker 2: changed the gameplay a little bit. One of the biggest
Speaker 2: changes he made was that the way that Moser Butts
Speaker 2: had come up with is that you just thought the
Speaker 2: word in like a kind of a mental version of
Speaker 2: the board, and the other player hopefully was able to
Speaker 2: pick up on the word you were thinking. And so
Speaker 2: Bruneau was like, maybe we should just replace with an
Speaker 2: actual board and tiles, and that really kind of helped
Speaker 2: move things along a bunch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I looked up this James Brunet, and
Speaker 3: you know, we get a lot of great information a
Speaker 3: lot of times from New York Times obituaries. And he
Speaker 3: was a friend of Butts, and so they used to
Speaker 3: play scrabble together on occasion, like their homemade version. And
Speaker 3: once this guy took it over, he and his wife
Speaker 3: Helen like operated out of their house and he was
Speaker 3: like a certain point, like all that was in our
Speaker 3: house was boxes of tiles and racks and boards, and
Speaker 3: we could move around. So they had to. They moved
Speaker 3: to an abandoned schoolhouse and then eventually a converted wood
Speaker 3: working shop, and they had thirty five employees working two shifts,
Speaker 3: producing six thousand scrabble sets sets a week by fifty
Speaker 3: three by nineteen fifty three, So.
Speaker 2: Within five years of him buying the rights, that is correct, sir, okay,
Speaker 2: So that the year before that. I've seen it told
Speaker 2: as a legend or a widely told story. Laura put it.
Speaker 2: I don't know why no one's like, yeah, that's what happened.
Speaker 2: But supposedly the president of Macy's came across the game,
Speaker 2: I'm not sure how played it, liked it, ordered a
Speaker 2: bunch to stock up. Of course, that meant gimbals immediately
Speaker 2: followed suit, and so the game took off from there.
Speaker 2: So this would have been nineteen fifty two when that
Speaker 2: supposedly happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Bruno was like, we can't possibly keep up
Speaker 2: with this demand, like this is just skyrocketed, which is great.
Speaker 2: But they turned to a company, a game maker called
Speaker 2: Selcho and Writer, and they took over making the game,
Speaker 2: and they did so for decades. They were the people
Speaker 2: who made Scrabble for a really long time. And within
Speaker 2: two years, two years of that great Macy's president story happening,
Speaker 2: four and a half million copies were sold. Like it
Speaker 2: just hit America, like you know, a giant packet of
Speaker 2: pop rocks and diet coke formentos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or like a ton n e of bricks, which
Speaker 3: is worth more than ton nice Jeff so that's selling
Speaker 3: pretty good. I think they've sold. They estimate about one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty million total sets as of you know,
Speaker 3: kind of now, even though it's hard to get a
Speaker 3: real firm number on that. But they bought that trademark
Speaker 3: Selchow and writer I want to say Richter there, but
Speaker 3: it is Writer bought that trademark from them. In seventy two,
Speaker 3: Bruno got a million and a half bucks, which would
Speaker 3: be about twelve million today. And this, by the way,
Speaker 3: was like he was looking for something to do in retirement.
Speaker 3: So wow, he really scored. That's a triple letter retirement gig,
Speaker 3: I would say, or triple word even. And then the inventor,
Speaker 3: mister Butts, got two hundred and sixty five grand wi
Speaker 3: should be about two million bucks. Plus he got a
Speaker 3: very small royalty that he seemed to be pretty happy with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he sounds like a great This is one of
Speaker 2: the more heartwarming quotes I've come across in a while.
Speaker 2: He was interviewed in nineteen eighty four about his invention,
Speaker 2: and he said people are always asking me if I'm rich.
Speaker 2: I used to get two to three cents for each
Speaker 2: game sold. One third went to taxes. I gave one
Speaker 2: third away and the other third enabled me to have
Speaker 2: an enjoyable life. Great, and if there's such thing as heaven,
Speaker 2: I believe that mister Butts is there right now.
Speaker 3: I think so too. He would have been in his
Speaker 3: eighties then too, because I think he died in the
Speaker 3: early nineties. In his nineties.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, there you go. He had a great life, apparently.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 2: So things turned kind of dark when the Cabbage Patch
Speaker 2: Kids bought Selcho and Writer in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3: You don't want to hear some funny what. Every time
Speaker 3: I looked at that word, I said colco oh, and
Speaker 3: I was like, well, I was like, that's so weird,
Speaker 3: Like I grew up with Calico toys. Yeah, and I
Speaker 3: just kept seeing it as colc and I was like,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, dummy, it's Calico.
Speaker 2: Well you must be a scrabbleist, because that would just
Speaker 2: be like the word construct without any right of meaning
Speaker 2: to it. So you're in there, Chuck. You really did
Speaker 2: some method research?
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe so so.
Speaker 2: Kalico. Yes, bought Selcho and Writer and just did not
Speaker 2: really give much of a care about scrabble. I mean,
Speaker 2: it was just a money maker. To them. Apparently they
Speaker 2: were already in trouble, which is nuts that they declared
Speaker 2: bankruptcy by nineteen eighty nine. I think I can't remember.
Speaker 2: Surely we talked about it in our Cabbage Patch Kids
Speaker 2: episode why that happened. But to go from having one
Speaker 2: of the hottest toys in the history of toys to
Speaker 2: bankrupt in the same decade as breathtaking as far as
Speaker 2: business goes. But when Calico declared bankruptcy, has Bro stepped
Speaker 2: in and they did seem to care a lot more
Speaker 2: about Scrabble, and so under their ownership, I think it's
Speaker 2: still owned by Hasbro if I'm not mistaken. It's been finitid.
Speaker 2: It's ups and downs, as we'll see. But there was
Speaker 2: also a bidding war for the international rights to produce Scrabble,
Speaker 2: and matel beat them out for that right, and that
Speaker 2: I can't imagine what a plumb that is. But it
Speaker 2: also occurred to me, and I know we've done an
Speaker 2: episode on intellectual property, but there's like there's some fictitious
Speaker 2: right out there that says this one company is allowed
Speaker 2: to produce all the games just internationally, this other company
Speaker 2: has this other fictitious right to produce all of the
Speaker 2: games just inside of the United States, And it's just
Speaker 2: so mind blowing to me that we've just kind of
Speaker 2: created that kind of made up structure for things, and
Speaker 2: how much just gobs of money that legal fiction creates
Speaker 2: for people.
Speaker 3: Are you pushing for just an open source world?
Speaker 2: No, not necessarily. I don't have a problem with it.
Speaker 2: I was more just astounded behind Yeah, you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, No, it's interesting. I mean, I mean, have
Speaker 3: you ever dug into like TV rights for professional sports leagues?
Speaker 2: Oh, my god, is that I'll bet that's quite a jungle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is. And it's gotten really really expensive. Like
Speaker 3: when you see the numbers, like you know, Amazon acquires
Speaker 3: the right to air whatever Sunday Night football.
Speaker 2: Or something, it's just like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I astounding what kind of money we're talking about?
Speaker 2: For sure.
Speaker 3: Anyway, I guess we can move on to competitive scrabble,
Speaker 3: because you know, a lot of people just play for
Speaker 3: fundzies at home. I know, our bud John Hodgman and
Speaker 3: his lovely wife Catherine play like for decades now because
Speaker 3: they're high school sweethearts, so they're long, long, long term scrabblers,
Speaker 3: you know, against each other. I kind of wanted to
Speaker 3: find out if there was a lifetime record that they
Speaker 3: keep up with surely, but then I just decided not
Speaker 3: to ask.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Hodgman used to live tweet their games, Oh he did. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was really cute to just kind of follow along.
Speaker 3: I bet they're both good because Catherine's an English teacher
Speaker 3: and John is you know, knows a lot of words.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Any anybody who knows Hodgman too, right when they
Speaker 2: saw the scrabble episode of stuff you should know, knew
Speaker 2: that there was one hundred percent chance. Yeah, Dodgmen was
Speaker 2: going to come up at some point in time. For
Speaker 2: sure he.
Speaker 3: Would have complained if we hadn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. He's a scrabble scrabble guy for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he would smoke me. In fact, I feel like
Speaker 3: I might have played him once on one of these
Speaker 3: trips that I used to do with him for maximum fun.
Speaker 3: But I don't know if we did play, it was
Speaker 3: not even competitive at all. I'm sure I don't see
Speaker 3: why he would have played. I don't see why he
Speaker 3: would have played me, because I'm really just you know,
Speaker 3: I'm like Steve Carell and Anchorman, Like I'll try to
Speaker 3: spell lamp. It's just because I looked at one.
Speaker 2: You know, hey, man, if to some points, who cares.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you and I probably be pretty good matchup.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so too. We should play sometime.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay, So that sounded unenthusiastic. I meant hell yeah, buddy.
Speaker 2: All right, Sorry you can't see me, but I'm raising
Speaker 2: the roof right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned competitive scrabble that there are tournaments, which
Speaker 2: isn't very surprising. I mean, people are into scrabble, so
Speaker 2: when you start throwing money down for like prize money
Speaker 2: for tournaments, people are going to flock to them. And
Speaker 2: for years, the main the biggest scrabble tournament, what they
Speaker 2: called nationals, was the North American Invitational Scrabble Players Tournament,
Speaker 2: which had its inaugural championship in nineteen seventy eight and
Speaker 2: was held every year through to two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2: And Selcho and Writer actually formed the National Scrabble Association,
Speaker 2: which was very smart because that kind of thing generates
Speaker 2: a lot of interest, enthusiasm. Newspapers cover Oh it's so crazy,
Speaker 2: there's a scrabble championship right now, and like it just
Speaker 2: helps keep the thing topical, you know, instead of just
Speaker 2: letting people buy it and crossing your fingers that kind
Speaker 2: of thing. It was a pretty smart business venture. And then,
Speaker 2: like I said, Callco came along, they did nothing for it.
Speaker 2: Apparently the Players Association had to shame Kalico into chipping
Speaker 2: in five thousand dollars for prize money for the national tournament.
Speaker 2: And then when Hasbro came along, they started funding it
Speaker 2: a lot more lavishly. But then they kind of said,
Speaker 2: you know, this isn't actually worth it anymore. You guys
Speaker 2: are you know, maybe a few hundred people coming to
Speaker 2: these tournaments and you all have all of the scrabble
Speaker 2: boards that you're ever gonna need and I gonna buy anymore.
Speaker 2: So they stopped funding those and they actually shut down
Speaker 2: that the National Scrabble Association. So an independent version came up,
Speaker 2: the North American Scrabble Players Association, I think back in
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine is when it was formed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and before anyone writes in technically they didn't completely
Speaker 3: shut down the Nssay, they just stopped there. They weren't
Speaker 3: in charge of the tournaments anymore. They just they moved
Speaker 3: them over to another program called School Scrabble.
Speaker 2: Yes, because those kids have a long life of buying
Speaker 2: scrabble boards ahead of them.
Speaker 3: That's right. You mentioned ups and downs over the years.
Speaker 3: You know. I guess all board games go through kind
Speaker 3: of boom periods and bus periods, or at least low periods,
Speaker 3: and scrabble is no different. There was an early two
Speaker 3: thousands boom. There were televised tournaments. It's interesting what drives
Speaker 3: this stuff. I don't know if they know on the inside,
Speaker 3: but I couldn't figure out why it would have had
Speaker 3: a boom in the two thousands. Early two thousands.
Speaker 2: Oh, a documentary called Word Freaks. I believe, oh that
Speaker 2: it introduced it to a whole new generation.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, well your.
Speaker 2: Head and yeah, and it took off like it like
Speaker 2: Hasbro has a lot to be thankful for from that
Speaker 2: documentary from what I understand.
Speaker 3: Oh, I bet the New York Times Crossword documentary to
Speaker 3: kick that up a notch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, that was a great one.
Speaker 3: But we're not talking crosswords again, so don't worry.
Speaker 2: It just busted out and sweat.
Speaker 3: You gotta flop, So what happening? There were seventy five
Speaker 3: thousand rated scrabble tournament games in two thousand and four.
Speaker 3: And that number by twenty nineteen was cut almost in half.
Speaker 3: That went down to forty thousand, and the Nationals went
Speaker 3: from eight hundred and thirty seven players to two eighty
Speaker 3: over that same span. So it just seems like that
Speaker 3: documentary really caused a resurgence, I guess, and then it
Speaker 3: kind of went back to level set maybe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. There was also a lot of internal
Speaker 2: strife to the North American Scrabble Players Association. Didn't make
Speaker 2: a lot of friends. They established a real top down
Speaker 2: hierarchy of how that association was run, so some other
Speaker 2: players associations were developed splintered off. There was a lot
Speaker 2: of fracture I guess in the scrabble community that just
Speaker 2: kind of came around that time. That surely affected attracting
Speaker 2: new people. Like I hate to use the word toxic
Speaker 2: because I feel like it's definitely overused, but it feels
Speaker 2: like that community got a lot more toxic around that time,
Speaker 2: And you know that doesn't exactly attract people like, Hey,
Speaker 2: I wanted to join that toxic subculture really mix it up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well some people are into that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those aren't the people you want to attract your
Speaker 2: toxic subculture though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or play scrabble with. Right, if you're in a tournament,
Speaker 3: you're going to see some big scores they have, you know,
Speaker 3: scores over eight hundred points at times in tournaments. The
Speaker 3: highest scoring legal word I don't think it's ever been
Speaker 3: played officially, but that would be yes, one thousand, seven
Speaker 3: hundred and eighty four point score if that was across
Speaker 3: three different triple word scorers. That word is oxy oxyfin bututazone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a now banned and said pain reliever.
Speaker 3: That's right. And since I know you looked it up
Speaker 3: because I did too, I'll let you give the definition
Speaker 3: of cazique, which is the highest score ever for a
Speaker 3: word played in a tournament. Three hundred and ninety two
Speaker 3: points for cazique.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, so that one. From what I could tell,
Speaker 2: I found that as a Spanish word for an indigenous chieftain,
Speaker 2: usually among Caribbean tribes.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I saw that the Taino people like the indigenous Bahamians, right,
Speaker 3: and that was actually played amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's so that's one word for three
Speaker 2: hundred and ninety two points. To put that into perspective,
Speaker 2: a good you know, average person's scrabble score. From what
Speaker 2: I could tell couple to a few hundred points. This
Speaker 2: is like a scrabble score with just a high scrabble
Speaker 2: score with just one one word. This is like the
Speaker 2: level that these people are playing at. And Chuck, I
Speaker 2: I say, we take another break and we'll come back
Speaker 2: and we'll poke around in the brains of those high
Speaker 2: level scrabble players and see what neurologists have found out recently.
Speaker 3: Let's do it. I want to learn about a terror
Speaker 3: in college dactyl how to take a perg.
Speaker 2: Is gone.
Speaker 3: That's another.
Speaker 1: Word up, Jerry, Okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2: So we've kind of made mentioned a couple of times
Speaker 2: that people who play scrabble like think of words differently
Speaker 2: than normis too, and there have been studies using the
Speaker 2: Wonder Machine, in particular by neurologists of the brains of
Speaker 2: people who play scrabble, because there's a lot of long
Speaker 2: standing discussions, rival theories and hypotheses about how we process
Speaker 2: words and information associated with words, and by studying scrabble players,
Speaker 2: like high level scrabble players, they found that their brains
Speaker 2: literally work different when it comes to words.
Speaker 3: Yeah, take it away.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the studies, I can't remember what year
Speaker 2: it was, I actually failed to look now that I
Speaker 2: think about it. They found that when you put the
Speaker 2: put a scrabble player through what's called the lexical decision task,
Speaker 2: which is showing people very quickly jumbles of words and
Speaker 2: saying is there a word in there too late? Is
Speaker 2: there a word too late? They have to answer really
Speaker 2: quick and there's always some lab assistant shouting too late
Speaker 2: and really just mix things up a little bit. Scrabble
Speaker 2: players use regions of their brains that most people wouldn't use.
Speaker 2: They and they don't use regions of their brains that
Speaker 2: people normally do use. Say so, like when you think
Speaker 2: of a word, you think of the meaning. Usually that's
Speaker 2: how you grasp a word when and you're really kind
Speaker 2: of processing what the word is, there's a meaning attached
Speaker 2: to it, there's a symbolism attached to it. With a
Speaker 2: scrabble player, they do not think like that. They think
Speaker 2: of words as physical constructs of letters. There's no meanings
Speaker 2: aren't attached to them. That takes too long. They process
Speaker 2: them much more quickly because it's just a bunch of
Speaker 2: letters that you put together. It doesn't matter what it means.
Speaker 2: It just matters that you can get this number of
Speaker 2: points on a scrabble board. One of the other things
Speaker 2: they found is that they also use more spatial reasoning
Speaker 2: than the average person does when they're recognizing and processing
Speaker 2: words and letters, because they have to figure out how
Speaker 2: to orient them on the board and how they would
Speaker 2: intersect with other words on the board. So the brains
Speaker 2: change in the way they approach words change the more
Speaker 2: scrabble you play.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's it's almost like Tetris, like in
Speaker 3: their brains at a certain point, like they might as
Speaker 3: well just be Tetris blocks that are trying to fit in.
Speaker 3: Obviously not Tetris because you can't make you know your
Speaker 3: own size and shaped things.
Speaker 2: But you know what I mean, Sure, I know it,
Speaker 2: you mean, I think I think it's a good analogy.
Speaker 3: There's some other cool studies that there are, you know,
Speaker 3: kind of findings they found from different studies. The setup
Speaker 3: of this one is basically that if you have a
Speaker 3: college degree, they have found that you're less likely than
Speaker 3: those without with you know, less education to get age
Speaker 3: related memory loss in Alzheimer's. But in terms of scrabble,
Speaker 3: they found that that gap can be closed a lot
Speaker 3: if you don't have that college degree and you play
Speaker 3: a lot of scrabble, you can close that gap to
Speaker 3: where it's almost the same as people with higher levels
Speaker 3: of education as far as acquiring that memory loss in
Speaker 3: Alzheimer's pretty great.
Speaker 2: Take that, college boy.
Speaker 3: What about the Ruskies? That was interesting too.
Speaker 2: I thought, Yeah, they studied Russian engineering students, and by they,
Speaker 2: I mean the people who conducted this study. And they said, here,
Speaker 2: Russian engineering students, we're going to teach you scrabble and
Speaker 2: you're going to play it for a year, and then
Speaker 2: we're going to test you. We're going to have you
Speaker 2: play teachers who teach English as a foreign language. So
Speaker 2: they're Russian, but they know a lot of English, and
Speaker 2: we're going to play the English language scrabble by the way,
Speaker 2: So there's all the pieces on the board right there.
Speaker 2: And what they found is that the engineering students who
Speaker 2: didn't speak that much English were able to i think,
Speaker 2: in the words of the study, smoke the English as
Speaker 2: a foreign language teachers in scrabble.
Speaker 3: That's incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even though the teachers knew more English than the
Speaker 2: engineering students did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's super cool. They've also found that for tournament
Speaker 3: play men dominate tournament scrabble tournaments generally speaking. But they've
Speaker 3: done studies of this and they're like, hey, it's not
Speaker 3: because men have big brains and women have little, tiny brains. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's not because guys can learn words better than women.
Speaker 3: Has nothing to do with any of that. It has
Speaker 3: to do with the fact that in general, overall, men
Speaker 3: start younger than women do. Boys, I guess start younger
Speaker 3: than girls when it comes to scrabble, and women generally
Speaker 3: and girls play more scrabble. But they say that's not
Speaker 3: necessarily how to get better at scrabble. They're playing for
Speaker 3: fun and just having a good time, Whereas to get
Speaker 3: better at scrabble, what these boys and men seem to
Speaker 3: be doing more of is like anagramming stuff and analyzing
Speaker 3: everything and instead of just like, hey, let's just play
Speaker 3: some scrabble and have some fun, Like, let me research
Speaker 3: and analyze this stuff so I can dominate in a
Speaker 3: tournament exactly.
Speaker 2: But I mean, that's how you get better at apparently
Speaker 2: anagram It was a huge thing to do if you
Speaker 2: want to get better at scrabble, because when you look
Speaker 2: at the you know, there's seven tiles on your tileholder,
Speaker 2: it's just a jumble of letters, and you have to
Speaker 2: find the words in those letters. That's part of the game.
Speaker 2: So if you go practice that, yeah, you're gonna get
Speaker 2: a lot better. But I saw that among just the
Speaker 2: population in general, just people who play scrabble for fun,
Speaker 2: it's much more closely divided. It's more like sixty forty
Speaker 2: men to women.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's changed a lot over
Speaker 3: the past couple of decades too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that documentary probably helped quite a bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when it comes to like, all right, what words, Like,
Speaker 3: what dictionary do you use? There is a Scrabble Dictionary.
Speaker 3: It's called the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary, was released in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy eight, again by Selchow and Writer, even though
Speaker 3: they worked with Merriam Webster to produce the game, because
Speaker 3: you know, they're dictionary people, and this has caused a
Speaker 3: lot of controversy over the years because words have been added,
Speaker 3: words have been taken away, and every time that happens
Speaker 3: the scrabble community, you know, some people are like, great,
Speaker 3: great change, and some people are like, no, I hate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because to them they're just words. The meaning has
Speaker 2: no purpose or point whatsoever in the game. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: So why would you take any words out that we
Speaker 2: could potentially use and score with.
Speaker 3: Some of the worst and the worst racial slurs out
Speaker 3: there have been in the Scrabble Dictionary.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, do you want to tell some people?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I'm not gonna say those, but there
Speaker 3: is a list. I think there was a woman named
Speaker 3: Judith Grad in the nineties who kind of got on
Speaker 3: her I don't want to say got on her soapbox
Speaker 3: because that indicates a bad thing. She got a campaign
Speaker 3: going to have these slurs removed. The Anti Defamation League
Speaker 3: got involved. Hasbro eventually said, all right, we're gonna remove
Speaker 3: these words from the next edition of the dictionary. Booby gringo, farted, honky,
Speaker 3: Whitey's pissed, fatso redneck, and wazoo.
Speaker 2: And Jerry best of luck beeping all those out.
Speaker 3: This should be pretty easy.
Speaker 2: So yeah, So there were a lot of scribble players
Speaker 2: who were like, this is outrageous. Who cares about offensiveness?
Speaker 2: And other people are like, this is kind of society
Speaker 2: evolving in real time right here. So I guess has
Speaker 2: Bro made a compromise and they said, well, how about
Speaker 2: this for tournament level, We'll keep the original. We won't
Speaker 2: take these words out. We'll have a separate book called
Speaker 2: the Official Word List. Among players, it's called TWL ninety eight.
Speaker 2: That's when it came out as nineteen ninety eight. But
Speaker 2: for everybody else. And that, by the way, the TWL
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety or ninety eight is just available to Players
Speaker 2: Association members, so it's not like available in general public.
Speaker 2: And then the other one, the toned down version, that's
Speaker 2: the one that the public will be able to get
Speaker 2: their hands on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that was in the early two thousands, and
Speaker 3: then in twenty twenty, the Official Tournament removed a lot
Speaker 3: of those slurs that they previously allowed for tournament play. Right,
Speaker 3: and I also mentioned, you know, adding words. Over the
Speaker 3: past few years, they've added hundreds of words. Jedi subtweet
Speaker 3: vacs have been added. Beria as in Beria, tacos has
Speaker 3: been added.
Speaker 2: Oh and I discovered a new dish from this too,
Speaker 2: Chuck cuckhumber usually spelled with a K, but apparently it's
Speaker 2: also okay to spell with the C. It's an Indian
Speaker 2: dish featuring cucumbers. It's like a fresh tomato cucumber salad.
Speaker 2: And actually I should correct myself. I think it could
Speaker 2: be Indian, but it's also possibly like Anatolian. I'm not
Speaker 2: a hunt okity, sure, but it sounds delish. I'll send
Speaker 2: you the recipe, all right, do it.
Speaker 3: They also had slang from time to time, apparently I'm
Speaker 3: a I am m A as in I'm going to
Speaker 3: like I'm about to do something right.
Speaker 2: You can play that, yeah, you could. You could also
Speaker 2: play yeat, which is that I don't know many you know,
Speaker 2: I really feel like I've outed myself in the last
Speaker 2: couple episodes as skimbity to it buddy, not the edge
Speaker 2: lord that people assume that I am edged lord.
Speaker 3: There has been some cheating over the years. We'll talk
Speaker 3: about a couple of these incidents. Incidents. In twenty eleven,
Speaker 3: there was a World Scrabble Championship between a tie player
Speaker 3: named cholapot et Ari and a British guy named Ed
Speaker 3: Martin because it was a missing G E tile. And
Speaker 3: there's a lot of versions of this story. Apparently Time
Speaker 3: Magazine and some scrabble websites say that Etri called for
Speaker 3: Martin to be strip searched for that g and the
Speaker 3: tournament officials were like, no, we're not going to do that.
Speaker 2: We don't want to.
Speaker 3: In mental floss, they said that, you know, they asked
Speaker 3: them to turn their pockets inside out, and that eventually
Speaker 3: just escalated to like, hey, maybe they hit it in
Speaker 3: their pants, they should be stripped searched.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's yeah, that's why you strip searched.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is that is that in the Scrabble dictionary.
Speaker 2: There's no way that it's not. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 2: you keep talking, you tell the story, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to look it up.
Speaker 3: Uh. And then what they eventually found out was that
Speaker 3: the missing G was in the pocket of another player
Speaker 3: from a previous game. And what I want to know is,
Speaker 3: like who who's running these tournaments? Like how are you
Speaker 3: not counting the letters before the game or cracking up
Speaker 3: in a brand new scrabble seal factory sealed Scrabble, Like
Speaker 3: you got to count those letters, You got to make sure.
Speaker 3: That's like playing chess without like a pawn and just
Speaker 3: being like, oh it looks good to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's nuts. It's also nuts. Just how how many
Speaker 2: players do cheat in like high level tournaments.
Speaker 3: Like that kid, Yeah there was a kid.
Speaker 2: He was thirteen, so he's unnamed as far as I
Speaker 2: can tell.
Speaker 3: He's of age. Now we should find him out in dots.
Speaker 2: He was playing down in Orlando at the Scrabble Nationals
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve, and he got caught palming blank tiles.
Speaker 2: And I don't know that we even mentioned what blank
Speaker 2: tiles are good for, but they well, they can stand.
Speaker 2: They're like a wild card. They stand in for any
Speaker 2: letter that you want, so they can really come in
Speaker 2: handy when you have like a bunch of letters but
Speaker 2: you just can't quite connect them. That blank tile comes
Speaker 2: in there and you say, thanks, blank tile. So if
Speaker 2: you have that, you have a huge advantage. So finally,
Speaker 2: this kid was caught cheating. But this was on the
Speaker 2: heels of a year before when he won the two
Speaker 2: thousand dollars prize for winning, even though apparently statistically the
Speaker 2: percentage of blank tiles that he came up with across
Speaker 2: the game or the games that he played throughout that
Speaker 2: tournament where it just doesn't add up. But they let
Speaker 2: that win stand. But for twenty twelve he got booted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they should have made that kid pay that money
Speaker 3: back with interest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they should have.
Speaker 3: What else there there was a they had their own
Speaker 3: little met too incident at one point too, didn't they.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's I don't want to say well regarded a
Speaker 2: well known player named Sam Kantamathi. And he is not
Speaker 2: just a player. He also has a side business of
Speaker 2: like custom equipment like kile holders boards. Timers is another
Speaker 2: one because in tournaments they used timers like chess. So
Speaker 2: he's got his whole line. He's like really integral to
Speaker 2: the current like scrabble World, tournament world. And for a
Speaker 2: long time, especially before Me Too came along, he just
Speaker 2: got away with it, Like the Players Association president would
Speaker 2: make a point of escorting women who went up to
Speaker 2: Kennamthe's hotel room to pick up equipment that they bought
Speaker 2: from or were buying from him, like you just didn't
Speaker 2: go alone, like it was an open secret. And then finally,
Speaker 2: like he just groped the wrong woman, Me Too came
Speaker 2: along and I think at least fifteen named women came
Speaker 2: forward and put their story already on the record about him,
Speaker 2: and the response from the Players Association was essentially like Okay,
Speaker 2: don't do it again. Yeah, and he had already been
Speaker 2: banned for cheating. He palmed tiles too, he was a
Speaker 2: national champion. He palmed tiles too. He got suspended for
Speaker 2: four years for cheating, but for the allegations of sexual misconduct. Nothing,
Speaker 2: just a warning essentially, So that really ticked off a
Speaker 2: lot of people, especially high level women players too, who
Speaker 2: were like, you know what, we have, we hold our
Speaker 2: own tournaments, and he's not invited any longer. So he's
Speaker 2: kind of been ostracized. But I have the impression that
Speaker 2: he's still very much.
Speaker 3: Around, still making those those custom racks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, from what I can tell.
Speaker 3: By the way we live update. We did text John
Speaker 3: Hodgman just to find out. I was kind of curious
Speaker 3: about a couple of things, and about his highest scrabble
Speaker 3: total ever and if he and Catherine have a running
Speaker 3: record between them, and he says, we have old notebooks
Speaker 3: full of score sheets, but we never go back and
Speaker 3: look at them, because I said, you know, John Hodgmen
Speaker 3: only looks forward. Time does not go backward.
Speaker 2: No, Nostalgia's a toxic impulse. According that's right, Hogman.
Speaker 3: We were both consistently in the three hundred to three
Speaker 3: point fifty pretty good mode. Okay, that's that sounds high
Speaker 3: to me. Yeah, same here, he said, this's good enough
Speaker 3: to make me happy. He said we have both probably
Speaker 3: broken four hundred a couple of times. I remember words
Speaker 3: better than scores. Twenty five years ago, I added st
Speaker 3: er to joke to make jokester on a triple word
Speaker 3: square while playing with some of my with some friends
Speaker 3: of my parents, And I don't remember the points, but
Speaker 3: I was really proud of myself.
Speaker 2: I'll bet, I'll bet. Every once in a while you
Speaker 2: can peek in on Hodgmen sleeping and he's got a
Speaker 2: big smile on his face because he's dreaming about that.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 2: I haven't a live update as well. Chod is not
Speaker 2: in the Scrabble really allowable word.
Speaker 3: Oh man, this opens up a whole new world of
Speaker 3: possibilities for the show live updates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Scrabble being the arbor of what words we
Speaker 2: can and can't use now exactly. So Scrabble, of course,
Speaker 2: is popped up in pop culture here or there. Rosemary's
Speaker 2: Baby very famously used Mia Pharoh used well, Rosemary uses
Speaker 2: scrabble a bunch of scrabble tiles to try to figure
Speaker 2: out that some suspected witches were actually witches by using
Speaker 2: the tiles to figure out anagrams. Yeah, same with sneakers.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find that that I saw the movie. I
Speaker 2: never saw the movie, and I couldn't find the clip
Speaker 2: with the scrabble. I just saw mention of it in
Speaker 2: a couple of places.
Speaker 3: I don't remember scrabble. It was a long time ago.
Speaker 3: I love this one. Frank, Oh, Frank, the chairman of
Speaker 3: the board, mister Sinatra in his version of the Twelve
Speaker 3: Days so Christmas added nine games of scrabble. Yeah, that's right,
Speaker 3: which is actually Joe Piscopo doing Frank.
Speaker 2: Which that's all you need to do. That's better than Frank,
Speaker 2: I think. And then Seinfeld and Calvin Hobbs both kind
Speaker 2: of famously had scrabble made up high value scrabble words
Speaker 2: in their shows. In the first season of Seinfeld, I.
Speaker 3: Don't remember who was it, do you know?
Speaker 2: Seinfeld's mom played quone quo n e and like, Seinfeld
Speaker 2: calls her out on it and it's not actually a word,
Speaker 2: but Kramer's like, yeah, quone whatever. But the biggest thing
Speaker 2: that stood out to me in this scene that I
Speaker 2: watched it today, they had the original dad just did
Speaker 2: not work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then they brought in I can't remember his name,
Speaker 3: but he was the dad and Arthur.
Speaker 2: Oh was he the dad in Arthur?
Speaker 3: He was e Liza Minelli's father and Arthur Okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah he was. He was Morty Seinfeld.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: His first name is Barney. I think god I.
Speaker 3: Used to know his name because Arthur's you know, one
Speaker 3: of my top ever comedies.
Speaker 2: And then Calvin and Hobbes. I think Calvin played z
Speaker 2: q M or zeq FMGB and said it was a
Speaker 2: type of worms from New Guinea.
Speaker 3: That's funny.
Speaker 2: And then lastly, Chuck, we can't forget scrabble led to
Speaker 2: trivial pursuit being created, because remember they went and got
Speaker 2: a new scrabble board, and we're like, how many scrabble
Speaker 2: boards have we bought over the years? We should make
Speaker 2: an end game. That's right, And that's it. Scrabble has
Speaker 2: not appeared in any other part of pop culture except
Speaker 2: for those things, right, that's right. You got anything else, no, sir?
Speaker 2: All right, well let's scrabble everybody. Thank you for finally
Speaker 2: doing it, Chuck. And since I thank Chuck for finally
Speaker 2: relenting and giving in on doing an episode I've wanted
Speaker 2: to do for years and years and years, it's time
Speaker 2: for a listener mail.
Speaker 3: Oh you hi, guys, or basically just the voices that
Speaker 3: live in my head permanently, because I listened to you
Speaker 3: two all the time nice a while back. I have
Speaker 3: no idea where the idea came from. I wonder whether
Speaker 3: everyone sees concepts the same way in their head as
Speaker 3: I do. And started asking around because she's referencing like
Speaker 3: the Inner Dialogue app where people don't hear words, they
Speaker 3: see images, and Daisy says this, and this is very interesting.
Speaker 3: I think I noticed that for me, the calendar months
Speaker 3: of the year in my brain are arranged like this January, February, March, April, May, June, July, December, November, October,
Speaker 3: August on the line below, like it's very important the
Speaker 3: way it's spaced out, I think. And it's also indented,
Speaker 3: So December, November, October August is on the line below
Speaker 3: and dented and dented to about mid February, so going
Speaker 3: from left to right and then making a curve to
Speaker 3: continue from right to left. No need to point out
Speaker 3: how weird this is, guys, because no calendar ever was
Speaker 3: drawn this way. However, this is how it is normal
Speaker 3: for me in my head. You can imagine the weird
Speaker 3: faces I got when asking this question enthusiastically to find
Speaker 3: out about other people's head calendars, especially when I told
Speaker 3: them about mine. Anyway, all this to ask, when you
Speaker 3: picture a yearly calendar in your head, what does it
Speaker 3: look like? Immediately when I read that, the only thing
Speaker 3: that popped into my head was a like the back
Speaker 3: of a of a like a wall calendar you would
Speaker 3: get as a teenager, where I had all all of
Speaker 3: them listed. That's what I picture.
Speaker 2: Oh nice, So what are the what are the monthly
Speaker 2: centerfolds over?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know, but I guess it would just
Speaker 3: be four four and four. Okay, that's how I pictured
Speaker 3: it in my head January, February, March, April, and then
Speaker 3: four more than four more in order.
Speaker 2: Because I'm not weird, I don't know. I'm trying to
Speaker 2: come up with it now, and I don't really think
Speaker 2: I keep a calendar in my head. I'm just too
Speaker 2: like in the present, you know, like in the now. Yeah, baby,
Speaker 2: sorry to let you down. Who is that? Uh?
Speaker 3: That is Daisy and Daisy is from Belgium. Thanks Daisy,
Speaker 3: that's the problem.
Speaker 2: That's from Belgia. There's your problem. Thanks a lot, Daisy,
Speaker 2: that was wonderful. I feel like also that somebody can
Speaker 2: make a T shirt of like the visual representation of
Speaker 2: the calendar in Daisy's head, and it would be the
Speaker 2: most arcane, deep cut stuff you Should Know te shirt
Speaker 2: of all time.
Speaker 3: Totally.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, if you want to get in touch with
Speaker 2: this like Daisy did and share your mental whatever, we
Speaker 2: would love that. You can send us an email to
Speaker 2: stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,