As it happens

 As a literate individual, I like to think that I excel at playing Scrabble. I’m better than average, but I rarely best my three biggest challengers: My sister Pesha, who was valedictorian of her high school class; my niece, who has a PhD in community gardening; and my niece’s husband, a medical doctor. I can start out with a decent score — say, 30 points for my first move — and often hold my own for a good part of the game. Then suddenly one of these dynamos will add something like “Q-U-I-D-N-U-N” to an existing “C,” or enact a triple play of seven-letter words along the lines of “B-R-A-Y-I-N-G,” “R-E-S-O-R-T-S” and “C-R-E-A-T-O-R,” and I am bushwhacked. No matter how serviceably I have been playing, I will spend the rest of the game limping along 40, 50, even 150 points behind.

This weekend when Pesha and I were visiting my parents, we binged on Scrabble the way other addictive personalities abuse gin. By the third or fourth game, my sister used my aptly placed “U” from my own seven-letter mop-up — U-N-S-A-V-O-R-Y – to play the word “S-Q-U-E-A-L-E-R-S. That’s a nine-letter word netting two triple-word scores for a total of 203 points. She ended up with a final score  in the 440s. I too had my best-ever score in the low 420s. Yet once again my efforts were feeble in the face of the Scrabble-schwester.

One of my shortcomings as a Scrabble enthusiast is my disdain for so-called Scrabble words, mutations such as “na” — a variant of “nah” — and “tipi” instead of “teepee” — that serve to block your opponent from building out more conventional point-worthy words. Just because a romance writer once wrote about the steamy passion of an Arapaho maiden for a Nebraska cattlehand in a plains “tipi,” should the Scrabble dictionary legitimize the unauthorized spelling? On the grounds that orthography, not to mention human comprehension, profited greatly from standardized spelling, “tipi” ought to be banned from play. What’s to stop somebody — me, for example — from putting down “podbird” if I can define it as a woman who flits about listening to a podcast? True, the word hasn’t made it to a standard dictionary, but maybe now that I’ve used it on a blog post, some Scrabble minesweeper will ferret it out of the WWW and include it in the next edition of the Scrabble dictionary.

Pesha’s magnificent Scrabble score got us to talking about our small, unwitnessed victories. As I have since learned, her mid-400s score is not even close to the highest Scrabble score ever, a distinction that belongs to a carpenter from Massachusetts named Michael Cresta. About eighteen months ago, he racked up 830 points in a Scrabble club game. It doesn’t matter. Pesha consistently plays like a devil, peeling off two seven-letter words in a row, dropping the “Z” and “J” on triple-letter spots that catapult her leagues ahead of me. Sadly, as long as she plays in such recondite venues as our parents’ home, nobody will ever know how good she really is.

In other words, it may well be that a Frenchman named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded sound seventeen years earlier than Edison. But Edison had the pluck to grab the spotlight. Many of us little people indeed have a speck of singing ability, literary skill or Scrabble prowess, but unless we record them for posterity, nobody will ever know how we excelled. You can’t help but wonder what feats of intellect, artistry and athleticism occur routinely, and privately, to elevate us past the anonymity of our own lives.

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Create a word cloud of my text.