From: "Thomas, Graeme" <thogr04@mail.cai.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 09:27:05 -0400
Subject: RE: Lessons from Lafayette (2 of 2)
Message-id: <9710021325.AA09935@cai.com>
Robert Felt wrote:
At the time that North American Scrabble was getting organized, the Brits were playing "high score" wins."High score" and "wins" don't really go together. Until the late 80s, all that mattered was one's score; winning was irrelevant. This led naturally to an extremely artificial style of play, which was fun, but had many drawbacks. It really was a good idea to play an opponent who knew what he was doing.
OSPD was a tremendous step forward at the time it was created. To bitch about it now would be fatuous.This statement bears repeating.
The interesting point is that OSPD was created to stop the squabbles between players who were used to the various different dictionaries in use at the time. This is precisely what the SOWPODS proponents are trying to do, with the last remaining two lexicons in use.
but they were then under the leadership of Leonard Hodge,Bob: you are not allowed to use the words "leadership" and "Leonard Hodge" in the same sentence.
Foreign words such as "barf" or "aardvark" were considered anathema.This was due, as always, to a combination of circumstances. The box-lid rules stated that foreign words were barred, and so they were banned from tournament play as well. The dictionary at the time, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, hadn't been updated for many decades, and so its idea of "foreign" was a little dated. It was, of course, pre-war, by which I mean The Great War, 1914-1918. Common words like CHEF were disallowed.
The result was that OSW had no US input and the brits, in a reaction to the labarynthine rules they had been laboring under, switched to the opposite extreme, if its in the book its good.This was done in several stages. The original rules were something like "all boldfaced words, plus reasonable inflections, except proper nouns (words with an initial capital letter), abbreviations, words requiring apostrophes or hyphens, obsolete words, foreign words, words marked with the authors Spenser, Shakspere, or Milton, and words meaning the name of a letter". Gradually these restrictions were removed, and the last 4 have gone. We don't have as much flexibility with the "reasonable inflections" though: we used to be able to infer the existence of adverbs from any adjective.
In general, I would have to give high marks to Greenport for consistently working to build the World Championship. I am not unmindful that they are very small indeed compared to the massive bureaucracy of Hasbro.Much the same has to be said of Spear. The one big step they did was to replace Leonard Hodge (whose hatred of the game was exceeded only by his loathing of those who played it) by Philip Nelkon.
Graeme