This is now an international embarrassment! The (London)
Guardian comes looking for Scrabble's birthplace, and finds the sign is gone. How we disrespect our heritage! Somebody should at least spray-paint "caziques" on the sidewalk...
Saturday June 28, 2008
The Guardian
Spell boundWhen the Great Depression left architect Alfred Butts out of work, he scrabbled around for something to do - and came up with a game whose ingenious mix of anagrams, crosswords, chance and skill is still a winner, 60 years on. And yet it nearly didn't see the light of day... Oliver Burkeman reports...
The highest score that it is theoretically possible to achieve in a single turn in Scrabble is for the word "oxyphenbutazone". Even at the top levels of tournament Scrabble, this has never actually happened: it would require the game to have unfolded in exactly the right way up to that point, leaving exactly the right open spaces, and the right combination of letters in the bag. But if it did, it would span three triple-word scores, creating seven other new words on the board, for a total of at least 1,778, depending on which official word list you used. The closest anyone has come in real life was a now deceased Kurdish player, Dr Karl Khoshnaw, who got 392 points for "caziques" at a contest in Manchester in 1982....
The official position is that Scrabble is 60 years old this year - though that's slightly debatable and, believe me, Scrabble experts are the kind of people who like to debate it at length - so one hot afternoon this month, I took a subway train to Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, to try to find its birthplace. According to Mattel, which owns the rights in most countries, more than 150 million Scrabble sets have been sold, in 29 different languages, since it first went on the market; 30,000 games are started somewhere in the world each hour. I thought Scrabble's ground zero might be covered in worshipful graffiti, like the Abbey Road street sign or Jim Morrison's grave in Paris. But at the apartment building where Alfred Butts, an architect forced out of work by the Great Depression, had made the first board on his kitchen table, there was nothing. At the Methodist church hall a few blocks away, on 35th Avenue, where he'd tested different versions of the game on friends and neighbours, I'd been told I'd find a commemorative sign on which each letter of the word "avenue" had its Scrabble score displayed in the bottom right. But it was gone. Eventually, I found a tiny plaque on the side of the church annexe. It didn't feel like enough - but, as it turns out, Butts himself probably wouldn't have minded. He was a mild, undemanding man, and in any case, he was just glad Scrabble ever saw the light of day. Because it very nearly didn't.
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