Etymology Scrabbled

April 9, 2024 Longrider General News, General Rants, Political, Writing & Language 18

FFS!

Scrabble is set to change for the first time in its 75-year history as part of a new ‘inclusivity’ drive to deter those who find the word game too ‘intimidating’ from abandoning the game.

The much-loved board game will now be printed with a simpler version on the back of the original board for those whose knowledge of dictionaries and thesauruses are limited.

The new game from its owners Mattel is called Scrabble Together and will feature a second side ‘to make gameplay more accessible for anyone who finds word games intimidating’.

Words fail me. The whole point of word games is that it will increase your vocabulary. I was playing this game as a child and did pretty well at it (not that I have played for a long time as board games bore me). Indeed, as a child I already had an extensive vocabulary. It seems that this is not the case anymore and rather than encourage people to better themselves, Mattel are lowering the standards of the game by producing the thicko version, for the lazy twats who can’t be bothered to put in an effort to learn their own language.

Said to be designed with ‘inclusivity and collaboration in mind’, Scrabble Together will allow players to work as a team to complete ‘goal cards’. Different levels can be used and a simpler scoring system will be used.

It means participants will not be competing to get the highest score by placing their tiles in strategically placed positions.

Ah, yes. Can’t have winners and losers, can we? What next? Monopoly where everyone gets rich, or the officially endorsed Labour version where everyone ends up begging on the streets?

18 Comments

  1. …or the officially endorsed Labour version where everyone ends up begging on the streets

    Indistinguishable from the official Tory edition of course.

  2. I seem to remember that there used to be a simplified version of Scrabble for small kids called Junior Scrabble. I’m not sure why the game needs dumbing down anyway, the words used are picked by the players and can be long and obscure words or just words of one syllable. Unless of course basic arithmetic is beyond you as well.

  3. Dumbing down, deskilling, whatever you want to call it is a national disease, it starts from the very top where fourth rate chancers form the bulk of our elected reps and industry/institution leaders, as always monkey see monkey do this has filtered down to everything that we see and suffer in our everyday lives, education health plod councils quangoes and too many companies you name it, everything is being run by idiots.

    That they’re now doing the same thing to board games doesn’t surprise me one bit.

    I worked at the weekend, there’s a 30 something fairly new girl in QC, first time i’ve really had the opportunity to speak to her but she renewed my optimism that not all is not lost in that age group and some are still capable of independent thought….she was muttering about people in the lab not doing their jobs, lazy gits, then came the music to my ears…she said the recent pandemic wasn’t an alleged virus at all it was the morphing of already useless people into even more stupid lazy docile unthinking versions of themselves.

    This general deskilling and dumbing down is destroying our education and industries and therefore the very fabric of our country, i point out their failings fairly often to the management responsible when they’re complaining about the latest disaster from one of the deskilled half wits THEY employed, racing to the bottom like all the rest will only be halted when they stop and revert to skilling up.

    Quite cheered up an otherwise busy windy Sunday to find one so relatively young thinking outside the box.

  5. WHat is happening is that the game cannot now be sold in sufficient volume to maintain an adequate level of profit. So they’ve added a feature that spreads the reach of it, and might beckon a few more quid into the coffers. It’s sound business but is reacting to an unsound world.

    Or put another way, people these days are so ill-educated, ill-read and unenquiring that they have a vastly inferior vocabulary than had their forebears. When was the last time you came upn a word that you didn’t know and had to look it up? Mine was today. I bet kids just scan past words they don’t know, and not even a second later have forgotten it ever went past their eyes.

    Anyone else noticed that their kids don’t pronounce common words properly because they have never heard the spoken out loud?

  6. The challenge in all pastimes and games has to be to get to and beat the ultimate score. I used to like playing chess against an old Amstrad 464 computer, because the programme was much more basic than is written nowadays, but the modern versions of the software are just impossible to beat so the ‘fun’ and interest in the game is now lost!

    One pastime I am more interested in though, is doing Sudoku without physically writing in the ‘possibles’. The game becomes much more challenging, but there’ll always be an answer in the end, even if a good one takes several days – actually nearly a month on one b*****d!

  8. But surely there’s no need to dumb it down. In fact, it should be made more difficult. After all, people are getting smarter, just look at our children’s A level results.

  9. ‘… for those whose knowledge of dictionaries and thesauruses are limited.’

    ‘*is* limited.’ Even the DM journos need to know grammar.

  13. I thought these days Scrabble was mainly used as a name-generator for ethnics and chavs. I didn’t realise it was still an actual game!

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