a weblog of wordplay by Eric Harshbarger
Phoneys
A person new to the world of competitive Scrabble is often amazed at some of the words which have been deemed acceptable in the Tournament Word List. Some examples:UNIDEAED (that's UN-IDEAED, as in, not having any ideas) OUTSNORE NOSEDOVE (past tense of NOSEDIVE, a verb) UNIQUER (improper English, but acceptable) FURRINER (as in, "foreigner", poorly pronounced) TSKTSKSAnd this does not even address the words which are just out-and-out strange-as-all-hell-looking (OUGUIYA, RUFIYAA, YAUTIAS, etc).
After a while, however, veteran players just learn to accept the words, and at this point I'm actually intrigued by combinations of letters which I feel should be acceptable, but aren't.
Until the Tournament Word List was updated in 2006, UNTIMED was no good. And you could not pluralize SIDEARM (evidently "SIDE ARM", as in a weapon, is usually two words...)
Anyway, while my memorizing of all the 7s and 8s continues, I've started collecting "plausible phoneys" which have valid anagrams. I'll update this list as I recall more examples:
PHONEY VALID -------- -------- GROOVILY VIROLOGY OUTFILL TOILFUL RAZZLED DAZZLER (I always, incorrectly, think RAZZLE is a verb) UNSCARED DURANCES (UNAFRAID is good, not UNSCARED) UNSCORED CRUNODES
-- Eric
[24 September 2008]
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Comments about this article:
Nosedove... is that like snozzed as in "snozzed and lost" from the Mike Doughty song?Posted by: JB Lewis
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