Scrabble and Trash Talk
Playing Scrabble in my family involves a lot of trash talk. One might argue it's a healthy way for us to express our aggression over a friendly game. One might also argue that we Gayles are insane. It would not be the first time this idea has been expressed.
My family plays by some unconventional rules. We have a house rule that if you draw three tiles of the same letter you can throw the third one back and pick a fresh tile. You won't find that in the rule book. We also use the official Scrabble dictionary. By use, I mean we check opponent's words but we also "go shopping" when we want to find a word we hope exists. Sometimes the word does. We don't call that cheating. We call it increasing our vocabulary.
While I was home this weekend we broke out the board. Over our second game my brother Brian (who was winning at this point) says, "God. Here I am, nearly illiterate and I'm beating a soon-to-be-published author. What's that say about her?" My mother concurred this reflected poorly on me. Great. So now I am held to a higher standard in Scrabble play? After that remark, I laid down a seven-letter word and went on to win the game. Oh the trash that was spoken then was indeed worthy of my vocabulary.