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Surf’s down, wahine!

3 min read

I guess I was around 10 years old the last time I played Scrabble with my mom and sister. We often dragged the game out on Saturday nights after “The Lawrence Welk Show” was over.

I’m sure Scrabble boosted my vocabulary and contributed to my love of words. “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” 2022 edition adds more than 500 words which, although maybe not widely known or used in everyday conversation, are nonetheless legal to use in the board game.

Among the words added this year are:

  • Hygge – a Danish word that is defined as “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.” For a few guys I know, that word is “beer.”
  • Zonkey – an animal sired from a male zebra and a female donkey. Yeehaw (also added to the dictionary this year) for heehaw!
  • Fauxhawk (pronounced foe-hawk) – a hairstyle, similar to a Mohawk, that leaves a high center strip of hair in the middle of the head, but trims down rather than shaving of the surrounding hair. Look for “The Last of the Fauxhicans” limited series on Netflix.
  • Mofongo -a traditional Puerto Rican dish made of fried or boiled plantains. ¡Gimme mo’ mofongo, hermano!
  • At – but not in its traditional use as a preposition. Spawned by social media, “at” now refers to mentioning someone’s name in a tweet or comment – apparently a bad thing. (“Don’t at me, bro!”) I think this addition is a little silly. “At” is a perfectly fine word on its own, as any Western Pennsylvanian knows. “Hey, man! Where you at?”

My favorite 2022 addition, however, is “embiggen,” a word invented in 1996 by one of the writers for “The Simpsons.” Springfield, the fictional home of the animated family, has as its official motto, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” The motto comes from Springfield’s founder, Jebediah Springfield, revealed to be not a noble pioneer, but a pirate by Lisa Simpson. Merriam-Webster added the word in 2018. Its eight letters are worth 14 points in Scrabble, but the word can be worth more depending on where it’s placed on the board.

My family never played Scrabble competitively – or perhaps I should say contentiously. I’ve heard tales of knock-down, drag-out fights breaking out over the use of a word that no one has ever heard of, but is included in the Scrabble dictionary. For example, “caziques,” which refers to “black-and-red or black-and-yellow orioles of the American tropics.” Place this word over two triple-word-score spaces on the Scrabble board, and you’ll be awarded 292 points.

I can’t recall having fought over obscure words in our family games. Rather, after we looked it up and found it valid, we applauded the player for broadening our vocabularies.

Thus I learned that “wahine” (wah-hee-nee) refers to a female surfer. But I seldom use the word because I never bought into the whole Beach Boys/surfin’ safari thing. Why?

I can’t swim. And there’s no surf in the Beaver River.

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