We all invested many
years playing Scrabble. We put up with much commercial exploitation in the form
of periodic additions and deletions to approved vocabulary. Vocabulary itself
deteriorated with the addition of foreign words, abbreviations, acronyms and
colloquial nonsense.
The last straw was the
introduction of a new three-year dictionary change cycle, instead of the
five-year cycle, which we unwillingly tolerated. It is obvious that the change is
commercially motivated.
The solution is
simple. We need to register a new incorporated association, something like “Proper
English Scrabble Association Inc.”. All we need is a minimum of six founding
members, to be picked from among players who are sick of the current state of
affairs. I can look after the registration process.
The aim is to adopt a
new dictionary, to be permanent for at least 5 or 10 years. An initial idea is
to adopt a scrabble form of the Oxford or Cambridge
We need to produce our
own adjudication programme for quick checking purposes. For this reason, we
require at least one enthusiastic member with the required technological skill.
We also need to examine and avoid copyright issues.
Should you be
interested please email me, as an initial contact. Your identity would remain
confidential, if you wish:
If the idea appeals to
sufficient numbers, we would have our initial general meeting shortly after. We
can then say goodbye to incompetence.
2 comments:
I like the general idea, if only for freeing us from commercial shackles. But wouldn't be easier to clean up the lexicon of CSW15 rather than start from scratch?
Yours is a brilliant idea. I initially had a look at the Oxford, only to find out that it is in 20 volumes, selling at over a thousand dollars.
After reading your message, I trialled deleting entries from the Zyzzyva lexicon and found it very easy to do, but the volume of work would be hard for one person. It would be easier to break up the lexicon into say 20 pieces, for 20 people to work on. Deleted entries would be kept in separate files, for approval by a committee.
Please keep your responses to this post confined to my private email (mohammedhegazi@gmail.com). If we have sufficient numbers, we would use an emailing list of all interested people. An exchange of ideas would galvanise the project.
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