Old-school news, just in time
by Dictionary Scoop. If “nonverbal” is the opposite of “verbal,” shouldn’t “nonchalant” be the opposite of “chalant”? As it turns out, it’s not so simple. “Unpaired words” are terms we assume should exist, based on standard linguistic rules, but don’t. To test your knowledge and learn more about unpaired words, guess which of …
Continue reading “Turnabout Not Always Fair Play With Words”
by Kevin Burton My mom and I have played a lot of Scrabble over the years. Neither of us pursued victory by waiting around for jawbreaker words such as the one ones featured in yesterday’s Scrabble post. Muzjiks? Bezique? Quetzal? Let me know when you get those sets of letters on your rack! …
Continue reading “That’s More Like It!, Real Scrabble Strategy”
by Kevin Burton As usual, Dictionary Scoop has an interesting list today. But this one has next to no value. It’s a list of the biggest, bangiest Scrabble words. The words that if successfully deployed, would bring the highest scores. But your chances of ever having these exact letters on your board …
Continue reading “Interesting But Hard-To-Play Scrabble Words”
by Kevin Burton I actually did this, I promise. Neither Winston Churchill nor any other learned observer from the past, present or future, would have called this “my finest hour.” I bring you this, even though there may be somebody reading Page 7 for the first time today. Sheesh. There was a …
by Kevin Burton Merriam-Webster promised me a list of Scrabble words without vowels, but delivered a bunch of words (with one exception) with the letter Y in them. Y is a vowel, a card-carrying vowel. The fact that it has a part-time job as a consonant does not change that. The venerable dictionary …
by Kevin Burton The Scrabble words deployed against you that get you beat; those are the ones you remember the best. Something kind of similar happened with my Bible memory verses recently. I’ve written previously about my memory verses, typed on paper, taped onto index cards of various colors. I am up …
Continue reading “What I Couldn’t Remember, I Now Can’t Forget”
by Kevin Burton I don’t know what this story will do for you, but it could save my family a ton of cash. WalletHub, an online finance company that I had never heard of before last week, ranks Wichita in its top ten of travel destinations. And Wichita is way up high …
by Kevin Burton My wife and I loved our South Dakota-Nebraska vacation last fall. We really didn’t want to come home. On the way home I kept a Nebraska station on the car radio well past the point where we could actually hear it well enough to recognize a song. “Hey, if …
by Kevin Burton If you read this column often you know I’m a Scrabble player. Guess I’ve become an old Scrabble player. I used to laugh at my mom because she objected to some of the new words in the Scrabble Players’ Dictionary. I’m not laughing anymore. I have the sixth edition …
by Kevin Burton “Scrabble” is not a German word meaning “one letter off,” that’s just my little joke. Scrabble also at its essence is not a word game as commonly supposed, but a game of mathematics and strategic placement of little tile soldiers. For the words used in scrabble aren’t words so …
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