Comments on: Scrabble and Law French

By: Hobbit

Hobbit — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 05:50:37 +0000

English is a mega-aglutinive language. If you wish to be stodgy, you may suscribe to the philosophy of the Academie Francais and hasten the death of the language. If a constuct is used by an English speaker and understood by other English speakers, it is likely to be English. Nuff said.

Khobkhun kha! Anne

By: Hobbit

Hobbit — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 05:50:36 +0000

Khobkhun kha! Anne

By: pee on me

pee on me — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 01:25:40 +0000

pee on me. French or English?

By: Bored Frog

Bored Frog — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 18:43:33 +0000

Oh really. This is TOO dull.

Clearly the person doesn’t actually own an OSPD.

It’s rather simple to find all these words, or most of them, as the earlier posts indicate.

http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/pl/page.tools/dn/home.cfm

Please don’t waste our time with your trivial mono-linguistic banter. You’re like one of my undergrads who asks me to translate a word, when the dictionary is on the shelf…. a la “what is the French word for….?” bah humbug

By: Salil Mehra

Salil Mehra — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:33:16 +0000

Is it just me (if I read this right), or does it seem to be going out of one’s way to amputate his right hand for gibbeting before hanging him?

It has echoes of the punishment for treason, although I guess they didn’t disembowel him.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 05:53:36 +0000

Ah, the irony of Scrabble fanatics out-rulesing a contracts professor.

I’d accept “verboten” but none of the other words given here, but then, that’s probably why I don’t bother with Scrabble.

By: Bruce Boyden

Bruce Boyden — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:22:24 +0000

If "ursprache" is English, why not "verboten"?

By: Andrea

Andrea — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:18:57 +0000

Haha, I was just coming here to say VOX and TROVER are acceptable. As fun as it is to argue, in Scrabble there’s really only one question: Is it in the OSPD? You need to grab a paperback OSPD 4th edition from the bookstore, stat!

p.s. “Dit” is also good – like Morse code dits and dots.

By: Christine Hurt

Christine Hurt — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 19:25:36 +0000

Nate, who did you say was “intensely competitive” at Scrabble? You seem to be giving your in-laws a run for their money! However, I side with them on the general principle that just because a word is not French, that does not make it English. Pig Latin is not Latin; that fact does not make it English.

By: Nate Oman

Nate Oman — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 19:03:44 +0000

I clearly need to invest in the official scrabble dictionary.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 18:47:56 +0000

Just looked in my Scrabble dictionary: trover, replevin, and detinue are all there too.

By: William Baude

William Baude — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 18:45:23 +0000

Also odd because I’m pretty sure “vox” is on the official scrabble word list for tournament and other play.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 18:42:46 +0000

That’s very odd. So where do they draw the line? There are lots of French words that came into the English language more recently than trover and replevin: Oxford says trover came in the 16th century, “entrepreneur” and “entree” in the 19th, and I assume entree and entrepreneur are acceptable Scrabble words. I can see an argument for not allowing “fuit” or “dit” from your example above, since they’re no longer in English usage today. But trover and replevin are, so I don’t see the distinction between them and other words of more recent provenance.