07.26.08
Scrabble vous!
Because everything I know about French is wrong, I’ve taken away a series of delights from the Francophone World Scrabble Championship in Dakar, Senegal (likely spelled S-O-M-A-L-I-A by a certain Presidential candidate), held this past week. The Senegalese take their Scrabble seriously, and take great pride that once again they have beaten natives of their former colonizer at their own game. This is, I suppose, similar to Americans taking pride in spelling words like honor the way God meant them to be spelled.
Some highlights:
From an AP story (which confusingly never says specifically who won) highlighting African passion for competitive Scrabble:
“We have far less means than the French players,” says [32-year-old Elisee] Poka, who as a child in Ivory Coast made his own Scrabble set out of wood because he couldn’t afford a store-bought one. “But we keep on beating them.”
The story also mentions Ivory Coast native Joseph Kouassi, who used kitchen tiles as a kid to create the word tiles he couldn’t afford from the store. Now that’s admirable dedication to words. But what does Poka mean by “far less means”?
His French competitors used computers to spit out anagrams . . .
Oh. I suppose the French, so used to blood-doping in the Tour d’France, don’t mind brain-doping. Am I missing something, or isn’t this kind of like being able to use a dictionary at a spelling bee?
Another sign of Africa’s growing influence is the number of African words that have been accepted into the official Francophone Scrabble dictionary. The most recent edition has at least 20 African words, most in Wolof, Senegal’s main dialect. They include ‘yet,’ a kind of shellfish found off Senegal’s coast and ‘mbalax,’ the style of music made famous by Grammy winner Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s most famous singer.
I imagine that this has members of the Académie Française popping forehead veins all over Paris.
A couple of side notes:
- Riveting highlights of Francophone World Scrabble Championship action!
- My own little commentary on how “Scrabble is not playing fair,” an excerpt from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
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