Late one night last week, while perusing the list of scrabble challenges available on Facebook, I came across one issued by Claudine. She was a fresh face university student with a sprightly smile, crowned with velvety brown hair. So I quickly snatched her game up before anyone else did.
I opened the game with zone (26 points). She countered it with coquet (30 points), a flirtatious verb. My next moved was tins (22 points). She responded with camee (18 points).
Camee?
Was it a valid word? I tried looking it up in an online dictionary, but couldn't find it. Apparently it was a legitimate word, since the game board accepted it.
The scrabble dictionary has a number of peculiarities that set it apart from the ordinary dictionaries. For example, it accepts Qi, the Chinese word for energy, and Xi, the 14th Greek alphabet (did you know that?), but rejects Zen, which most people recognize. It won't permit Iraq, Iraqi, China, and Chinese, but allow German, Scot, and Japan.
Such is the consensus among the scrabble players worldwide. Who am I to challenge it? So I assumed Claudine's camee was just one of those anomalies.
As the game progressed, Claudine kept littering the board with words I'd never known to exist: manege, reve, and tapi, to name but a few. With every round, my admiration for her grew (I'm easily seduced by smart women).
I also became more and more puzzled, as many household words--like blue or camel--kept coming back as "invalid."
An hour later, with less than a dozen tiles left between us, I realized there was no way I could catch up to Claudine.
Suddenly, the chat window became alive.
"Va etre dur de finir ... enfin du moins pour moi," she said.
What?
I took another look at her profile. She was from Université Charles de Gaulle in France.
"Are we playing in French?" I asked.
There was a long pause. Even though we were hundreds of miles apart, I could almost hear her laughing uncontrollably, perhaps falling off the chair too.
"I can't believe you didn't realize earlier," she said.
Needless to say, I lost that game by about 100 points. But I thought I did rather well, considering I played in the wrong language.
At the moment, I'm playing 13 simultaneous scrabble games on Facebook with 8 different opponents, all in English (as far as I know). I'm thinking about challenging Claudine to a rematch where I'll have the home field advantage. But if she beats me in English, I may just have to ask this French girl to marry me.
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