Anagrammarian players sharks of word pool

Press, 5 November 1984, Page 26

Anagrammarian players sharks of word pool

By!

MICHAEL NORMAN,

“New York Times,”

through NZPA Massapequa, New York We have stumbled into a nest of anagrammarians. The air is thick with tropical fish, extinct birds, and South American flowering shrubs.

In this company, we are known as. a pushover (16 points). Thelma Baker, who looks as threatening as a British nanny easing along a pram (8' points), offers a challenge. The pushover holds his own for the first half of the game, then Mrs Baker, her reputation in jeopardy, hunkers down to the board and in a blaze of arcana, such as “oe,” a whirlwind off the Faeroe Islands in the North Atlantic, and “ai,” a three-toed sloth, she leaves the pushover wide-eyed. “I hate to take advantage

of you,” she said, reeking with pleasure. Mrs Baker is the director of the Massepequa Word Players, a club of 15 to 20 people who meet every Wednesday at 12.30 p.m. in a church to play Scrabble.

They nibble chocolatechip cookies, drink coffee, and reach into handmade knitted woollen bags to pull out their Scrabble tiles. But this is not a circle of little old ladies and little old men. These waters are infested with sharks.

Chief among them is Dee Jackson, an adjunct professor of law and a champion-ship-level player who enjoys self-parody and celebrates her obsession with the game.

Ask her, for example, if the game had anything to do with the breakup of her marriage, and, without interrupting her concentration

on the game, she quips, “Shall we say I exchanged my passion for my husband for my passion for Scrabble.” She holds the club record for a single game — 633 points scored on June 13, 1979. Her citizens’ band radio nickname is "Scrabbble Bum,” and her car licence plate reads “SCRAABBLE.”

She talks to herself as she plays, a Billie Jean King of the Scrabble set acting as her own self-critic and cheerleader.

Today, for example, Mrs Jackson is seated across the board from another accomplished player, Robert Frey, aged 24, an unemployed draftsman who, according to Mrs Jackson, “sprung up out of nowhere” as she once did.

At one point in the game, Frey, playing off another

word, made the word “souvenir” for 83 points. “God, that’s a nice find, Bob,” Mrs Jackson said. “Now I’m severely behind. What are you going to do about that, Tootsie?”

For those possessed, Scrabble is not so much a game as it is a way of life. Frey claims that he dreams anagrams and keeps the Official Scrabble Players’ dictionary next to his bed. “I like playing Scrabble in my sleep, he said. “If I see an interesting rack of tiles in my dreams, I can wake up and look up words.” In a conscious state, he can rearrange letters to form new words quicker than a scared linnet (a songbird, 6 points). To illustrate, he is offered the word “satire" plus the letter “n,” and in an abecedarian flurry makes anestri (periods of sexual dormancy), nastier, retains, ratines (coarse fabrics), retinas, retsina (a Greek wine), stainer, and stearin (part of the solid portion of a fat.) All of this, of course, requires a mind that can attach itself to the alphabet, or as MarjarieSchoneboom, another member of the club, put it, “You have to be a language freak.” As such, she likes to trot out two of her favourite words: floccinaucinihilipilification, the action or habit of estimating something as worthless, and omphaloskepsis, the act of contemplating one’s navel. These are not good Scrabble words, mind you, just a little sideline. A mother of five children who has played in national Scrabble tournaments, Mrs Schoneboom. began reading dictionaries as a child. This particular reading habit is common among inveterate players and often is a mark of their devotion to the game. “If you go to a Scrabble player’s house and have to use the facility,’’ Mrs Schoneboom said, ‘you expect to use the time productively. If they don’t have a dictionary in there, you begin to won-

As it turns out, they are a clannish lot who prefer the company of their own kind. Mrs Jackson once threw a party for some Scrabble friends and decided to invite some “outsiders” to. whom she owned a social thankyou. “After an hour,” she said, “the three outsiders became bored and left, and the rest of us could settle down to play the game.” On another occasion, she was out with friends at a restaurant and happened to be eavesdropping on a conversation at an adjacent table.

“I overheard the word ■ruinate,” she said, “and I said to my friends, ‘Wait a minute — ruinate. There are three anagrams in ruinate — urinate, uranite and taurine’.”

Like chess players, Scrabble players can recite their great coups. “The highest score I ever had on one word was on jonquils," Mrs Jackson said. “I hit two triple-word blocks for 356 points. I was playing against my son. He said, ‘Nice play, Mom,’ and he never played with me again.” Mrs Jackson has. “Scrabbled” her way across the country, played with a hangover, even played once asleep at the board. “It was at a tournament in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” she said, “we had stayed up for two nights partying. I was exhausted. My opponent was a toprated player from Baltimore. Ii was the first game that day. I was getting great tiles, like D-R-A-G-O-N and a blank. He was getting lousy tiles and was taking a long time to move. “He was taking so long, I just fell asleep. My head went forward on to my chest. Thank God he was staring at his tiles and didn’t see me. When I dozed off, I damn near hit my head on the board.”

Board? Hmmm. Broad, boa, bod, bar, bad, oar, dab, ado, drab, dado ....