xi
noun
1. The fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. – Oxford Dictionaries1
2. The easiest way of getting rid of that goddamn X tile in Scrabble. – The Nut
My mother and I played Scrabble a lot when I was growing up. We weren’t exactly competitive – we didn’t even keep score – but we considered it a failure on both our parts if we weren’t able to use up every single letter in the game every time.
Enter qat and xi, doing their part to keep Q and X out of the Scrabble orphanage.
We were Scrabble Dictionary skeptics; if we couldn’t find it in our phone book-sized Webster’s, then it didn’t fly. This ruled out a lot of words that could have given us a helping hand with the trouble letters if we hadn’t been such sticklers, but thankfully, qat and xi made the cut.
All the same, sometimes, even after pooling our remaining letters, Mom and I had to admit defeat.
That’s when we got silly.
Scrabble can be a lot of fun in “this is going to be a word whether it wants to be or not” mode.
I think that’s why I could never really get into Words with Friends. They can’t seem to appreciate the value of a good gweblr or a nice xypji when the pickings are slim.
Also they won’t let me swear, and that’s just fucking znivhut if you ask me.
Today’s blog post was brought to you by the letter X, the number 8, and the Why You Little…I’ll Triple Word Score YOU Challenge, AKA the Blogging A to Z Challenge.
1 “xi.” OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford Dictionaries, 2016. Web. 28 April 2016.
Spoken Like A True Nut 
Words With Friends is all fun and games until it won’t let you use a perfectly good word. Just because it happens to be in another language, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be considered valid. Stupid game.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Be a whole lot easier to get rid of a pesky Z if you could just sneak in some Polish, that’s for sure. Stupid game indeed!
LikeLike
Actually I realized I COULD do a Z post. Thanks for the nudge 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I played a lot of Scrabble too with various family members. Brought back lovely memories.
Fun post, and maxed the X challenge! Brilliant job.
Nilanjana.
Ninja Minion, A-Z 2016
Madly-in-Verse
LikeLiked by 1 person
I do kind of miss the days where the Scrabble board was never moved off the coffee table.
Nutty Hubby doesn’t like playing Scrabble with me. Something about me always winning.
LikeLike
Sometimes I just scroll through the Oxford English Dictionary looking for weird words. Or I go there to make sure I’m using a word correctly and then go off on a tangent because I see another word that looks so hilariously bizarre I think it was made up by somebody just screwing around and got published somewhere. And that’s all it takes for the OED to consider it a real word.
Anyway I’m sorry none of your neologisms are in there–YET–but the OED suggested these might be the real worlds I was looking for. I think they’ll all be rejected by Words With Friends.
gwely
xyrid
qiviut
LikeLiked by 1 person
My historical linguistics professor at university, in a rare moment of levity, once confessed to us that back in grad school he had actually failed a historical linguistics course. To get the extra credit he needed to pass the course and complete his degree, the department put him to work…editing a dictionary.
Since then I’ve always taken reference books with an extra grain of salt.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Totally fucking znivhut, I agree! As a kid, I loved Scrabble, but sucked at it. It wasn’t until I was older and realized the part of my brain that works to integrate what I see with meaning-making with my hands is broken that I understood why/how I was pretty good with words, but awful at Scrabble. This post took me back to my childhood and my parents’ kitchen table. Thanks for the happy memories it evoked.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My scrabble app has been giving me the shits lately – I’m positive it’s cheating. Easy enough when you’re also the dictionary and thus the final authority on a word’s acceptability. It’s used acronyms on me (“nairu”) and a word that I couldn’t find in any dictionary and was probably just made up – “mus”. (Urban dictionary has it as either meaning “cumstain” or an acronym for ‘make up sex’. It also okayed “myc”, “boi” and “prex” which is a SLANG term for president that I’ve never even heard of.
And yet it never lets me do “zen”, which IS TOTALLY A FUCKING WORD.
Btw another good one for Q is “suq”, apparently an alternate spelling for “souk”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The best part of games is the fun we have playing them. Scrabble can be frustrating if you play it with one OCD person.
Im blogging from Fill the cracks and Moondustwriter’s Blog. Happy last week of A to Zing!
LikeLike