Sunday Times 2
Scrabble is no longer what it wuz
It’s enough to make English language purists shake in their shooties, or perhaps even to lol.
But Scrabble is about to include text-speak and street slang in a raft of new words for its ever expanding dictionary.
Why? Because it has to stay dench, obvs. And anyone who cries blech (12 points) can just shut their cakehole (17 points).
The additions are said to reflect changes in language used by certain sections of modern Britain in emails, text messages and on social media.
Thus, it will be perfectly acceptable for players of the popular board game to spell yeesh (an interjection used to express disgust – 11 points); to use up all those pesky zeds with a shizzle (a form of US rap slang – 18 points); or amaze their bezzy (best friend – 18 points) to get podiumed (to finish in the top three places of a competition – 14 points).
Just don’t get in a schvitz (sweat – 24 points).
The new additions are among 6,500 to join an existing 250,000 accepted by overseers Collins Official Scrabble Words, the first update since 2011.
Shooties, by the way, are shoes that covers the ankle – 10 points; and lolz is presumably the street plural of laughing out loud at someone’s expense – 13 points. Dench means excellent – 11 points; and obvs is now official Scrabble-ese for obviously – 9 points.
For those unfamiliar with the kind of language in common parlance for text-speak generations, however, there is still a chance to score. Coqui (a tree-dwelling frog – 16 points); and quinzhee (an Inuit snow shelter – 29 points) are among the higher-ranking words.
Helen Newstead, head of language content at Collins, said: ‘Dictionaries have always included formal and informal English, but it used to be hard to find printed evidence of the use of slang words.
‘Now people use slang in social media posts, tweets, blogs, comments, text messages, you name it. So there’s a host of evidence for informal varieties of English that simply didn’t exist before.’
Or, to put it another way – the language simply isn’t the way it wuz (accepted non-standard spelling of was – 15 points).
© Daily Mail, London