The world’s a-scrabble

Stuck in snow and needing emergency shelter: you’re desperate. What you need is a quinzhee. Or was it a qajaq? Or ponzu? 

In a frantic moment of survival, the difference could be life or death. After all, ponzu is a Japanese dipping sauce. A quinzhee is a hut built of snow.

(Sadly, extra soy and citrus flavour on your frostbitten toes won’t help keep you alive, or warm.)

But in a more important sphere, the three are much the same.

Stuck without a response to your spouse — needing a strong counter for pride’s sake — you can now legitimately deploy all quinzhee, qajaq and ponzu as totally unfair Scrabble words.

It is worth noting that nobody will forgive you for them. “Quinzhee” alone could net 401 points, and its pronunciation will forever remain a mystery.

But they’re covered irrefutably: they’re “in the dictionary” now. A batch of 5,000 new words has been added to the game’s official white-list, and certainly it includes some wonders.

It is, remarkably, a publisher of real dictionaries, the American giant Merriam-Webster, who puts out the good book, and this year it has done so with a little bit of, let’s say, “mixing things up”. Corporate representatives claim that to make the cut, words must be between two and eight letters long, can’t require capitalisation or punctuation, and probably need to have been used at least once in an English-like context.

Apparently — to be fair — these words are in some other dictionaries already. But who can tell? And more to the point: don’t they know these stakes are higher?

Back to the new word-recruits. Here are the domestic-war inducing highlights: “da”, “gi”, “po” and “te”. Know the meaning of any of them? A hint: one of them can be used to kill.

No, you cannot kill in a quarrel over the word and claim self-defence. The trusty old argument (“THAT’S NOT A REAL WORD!!”) won’t hold in court, according to people with knowledge of any matter at all.

The forlorn truth is they’re all words now: the tides are coming in; the water is rising. Soon, nothing will be false enough, or even be worth snickering at — the people are in fear: we’ll be left with no place to be uppity.

So chillax, frenemy; put on your dubstep mixtape, and yuzu the schmutz off your selfie, po. Don’t go buzzkilling a coqui in mid-flight by swinging around your qigong. The words in this paragraph are newly vlog for Scrabble. The horror!   Khaleej Times

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