By Rosie Moore

When I was a young girl we played board games such as Candyland, Monopoly and Chinese checkers. Then I got married and didn’t have much time for games until the children were old enough to play. After they got married a good friend of mine and I used to play scrabble on many afternoons, especially on Sundays. We were not intellectually inclined but we did advance from three-letter words like cat and hat with no trouble at all. We had a scrabble book with all the two-and-three letter words, plus our own dictionary. There were quite a few challenges along the way, each of us thinking a word was a word when it wasn’t. They looked good but were not spelled correctly.

As we all know, the arrival of the electronic age has changed our lives in many ways. I know of people who sit at there pc’s for hours playing various games but I don’t have time for that. However, I do like to sit for about an hour in the evenings and play my favorite game. Playing scrabble on the computer is nothing like the old board game. With the touch of a finger and a click of the mouse a word magically appears in seconds. Plus you can play with as many people as you desire.

There are words on the computer used in scrabble that no one ever uses in everyday language- words such as suq, yoni, qat, thraldom, izar, and vatu. I could go on and on. Can you use these words in a sentence?

Well, let’s see. “I went to the suq (Persian market) with some vatu (money) to buy an izar (muslin garment), but the thraldom (serfs) started a riot and the yoni (life) I knew ceased to be. Of course, it stands to reason that these words are from other nationalities and are not used in our daily life, but they do exist in the Scrabble game. Oh, I forgot to add that a qat is an Evergreen shrub.

Some words are recognizable, such as knar (a knot in a tree) mool (money), Quin (one of five quintuplets), fluor (rite), bot (bottom), and vill (a). Did you notice what they are doing here? They leave off the last letter of a word. Is that legal? Evidently it is because it’s done all the time. That’s the only quarrel I have with playing that game on the pc. Mool is actually Moola; knar is really knarl, etcetera, etcetera. Well, no matter. I’ve learned a lot of new words and although I won’t use many of them in my daily life, they are still fun to use when playing a game.

There is still something to be said about sitting around a table with family and friends, screaming, giggling and slapping each other’s hands in high fives. Nothing can take the place of that, but when friends or family are not available, that scrabble board on the pc is there to give us a few minutes of relaxation.

Thought for the day: whoever enjoys his life is doing the Creator’s will.-Jewish proverb

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