Scrabble Word Quotes

There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.

We're playing Scrabble. It's a nightmare." "Scrabble?" He sounds surprised. "Scrabble's great." "Not when you're playing with a family of geniuses, it's not. They all put words like 'iridiums'. And I put 'pig'.

(My proudest moment as a child was the time I beat my uncle Pierre at Scrabble with the seven-letter word FARTING.)

How did I love her? Let me count the ways. The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed on her lower lip when she walked and how when she ran she looked like she was born going fast and how she fit perfectly against my chest; her smell and the touch of her lips and her skin, which was always warm, and how she smiled. Like she had a secret. How she always made up words during Scrabble. Hyddym (secret music). Grofp (cafeteria food). Quaw (the sound a baby duck makes). How she burped her way through the alphabet once, and I laughed so hard I spat out soda through my nose. And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in the world. This was my secret: she was the one who saved me.

Aunt Mercy put down her tiles, one at a time. I-T-C-H-I-N. Aunt Grace leaned closer to the board, squinting. "Mercy Lynne, you're cheatin' again! What kinda word is that? Use it in a sentence." "I'm itchin' ta have some a that white cake." "That's not how you spell it." At least one of them could spell. Aunt Grace pulled one of the tiles off the board. "There's no T in itchin'." Or not.

[Calvin and Hobbes are playing Scrabble.] Calvin: Ha! I've got a great word and it's on a "Double word score" box! Hobbes: "ZQFMGB" isn't a word! It doesn't even have a vowel! Calvin: It is so a word! It's a worm found in New Guinea! Everyone knows that! Hobbes: I'm looking it up. Calvin: You do, and I'll look up that 12-letter word you played with all the Xs and Js! Hobbes: What's your score for ZQFMGB? Calvin: 957.

One night, bored and restless, I found a stack of dusty board games in a closet, and bullied Ash into learning Scrabble, checkers and Yahtzee. Surprisingly, Ash found that he enjoyed these “human” games, and was soon asking me to play more often than not. This filled some of the long, restless evenings and kept my mind off certain things. Unfortunately for me, once Ash learned the rules, he was nearly impossible to beat in strategy games like checkers, and his long life gave him a vast knowledge of lengthy, complicated words he staggered me with in Scrabble. Though sometimes we’d end up debating whether or not faery terms like Gwragedd Annwn and hobyahs were legal to use.

We read all twenty-eight emails. When she is finished, Mirren kisses me on the cheek. "I can't even say sorry," she tells me. "There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.

The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?

Palindrome as well. My sister's name is Hannah. Father liked word games. He was fourteen times World Scrabble Champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score.

It's his word against the Commander's, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

Wait,” he said. “That’s not a word.” I looked down to where, in a moment of desperation, I’d played zixic on a triple-word-score space. “Uh, sure it is.” “What’s it mean?” “It’s sort of like…quixotic, but with more…” “Bullshit?” I laughed out loud. I’d never heard him swear before. “More zeal. Hence the z.” “Uh-huh. Use it in a sentence.” “Um…’You are a zixic writer.’“ “I don’t believe this.” “That you’re zixic?” “That you’re trying to cheat at Scrabble.” He leaned back against my couch, shaking his head. “I mean, I was ready to accept the whole evil thing, but this is kind of extreme.

I can’t even say sorry,” she tells me. “There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.

Henry: [in an interrogation room] Don't say a word. Shawn: [pause] Fergulous. Henry: Shawn, I said no words. Shawn: Oh, I see. Two weeks ago, we're playing Scrabble, it's not a word. Suddenly it is a word because it's convenient for you.

I spent the better part of the afternoon and evening playing Scrabble with Deacon. I think he regretted asking me to play, because I was one of those Scrabble players - the kind who played three-letter words every chance I got.

Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.

It's going to be okay. Words that mean nothing. really, just sounds intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch on to something when we're falling.

I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do!

Okay. Scrabble, donuts, flowers, corndogs, pre-pubescent British wizards and indie music. Am I missing anything important?” She’s still blushing and it’s like the heat in her face is trapping all the words inside of her. “What is it?” I ask, an involuntary grin tugging on my mouth. I love it when she blushes like this. Amy sighs, looks up toward the chandelier, “You, Cole. I like you.

Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

Words that mean nothing, really, just sound intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch onto something when we're falling.

Jeff is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who plays a lot of obscure two-letter words that shouldn't count but for whatever reason are considered legitimate. My father is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who takes hours with his turn and then plays deliberately misspelled words that no one has the heart to call him out on. I am the perfect Scrabble player, both serious and considerate. Obviously I lost by a lot.

Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette (skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.

...art is weaker than life - in the end I have a bag of letters to scrabble into order - rune tiles to cast my fate...

There was more she wanted to say. He could feel the words scrabbling at the clasps of her thoughts, eager to be known. Freed. But she stood there, stony- faced and impassive. And he remembered the girl he had glimpsed from the Grotto— the one who let her shoulders drop when no one looked, the one who fought every day when no one noticed. The one who had once hoped that the Night Bazaar traded on dreams. She deserved more than loneliness.

Do you mind if I pause this incongruous exchange on water fowl to catch our guy?” Dex held back a smile. “Ooh, someone’s been playing online Scrabble with Cael again. How many points did incongruous get you?” When Sloane didn’t reply, Dex turned to his brother. “Fourteen,” Cael offered cheerfully, earning himself a scowl from Sloane. Dex shook his head. “Could have gotten twenty on Words With Friends.

No Scrabble. More and more of his friends were playing it now, in a knowing ironic way, triple-word-score-craving freaks, but it seemed to him like a game designed expressly to make him feel stupid and bored.

It’s going to be okay. Words that mean nothing, really, just sounds intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch on to something when we’re falling.

Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words. Maybe

Whenever he'd launch into talking, his turtle-green eyes would get a dark zoom when he rummaged for words, like a hand silently dipping into a Scrabble bag, feeling for the next vowel.

I would not care," I said. The words scrabbled from my mouth. "Whatever you became. It would not matter to me. We would be together." "I know," he said quietly, but did not look at me.

I sat there listening to him talk and talk and I realised something really important. I thought I was in love with him for all those years but it turned out I was in love with the idea of William. The actual reality was a bit of an anti-climax. I thought, well, William would never shove the word WAG into pop songs to make me laugh and he wouldn’t bite the chocolate off chocolate-covered strawberries for me and he’d never, ever watch a film with Sandra Bullock in it, unless it was a Shakespeare adaptation and then he’d spend the entire film listing all the historical inaccuracies and he’d never go down on me for half an hour because he’d lost a game of Scrabble. Point of fact, I can’t imagine William doing anything that would mess up his hair, and he’s started popping the collars of his shirts and have I mentioned that he’s not you? He’s not you, Max, and that’s why I’m actually really pleased that he’s engaged and he’s moving to Warwickshire so I don’t have a constant reminder of what an idiot I’ve been.

The intriguing thing about playing Scrabble is that as soon as the board is set up in front of me, I don't know any words. Other than cat and bat and rat, everything disappears from the language drawer in my brain. My mother, on the other hand, who normally speaks English like a regular person, spells things like qiviut ("wool of the muskox") and hake.

The year of the birth of Israel, the year of the Republican tax cut and the Truman Balcony, would be remembered also as the year green (chlorophyll) chewing gum became a fad, the year of a new word game called “Scrabble,” of tail fins on Cadillacs, and an unimaginably daring new bathing suit called the bikini, after the island where the atomic bomb tests were carried out the summer before.

Ja-nee, there had been some good times at the academy over Scrabble boards. Of course, the long evenings had always ended in recriminations when one or other recruit insisted that 'pzxtrri' was a word, and the others had told him to prove it, and he'd said Fine, give me a dictionary, and they'd said You know we don't have a dictionary, and he'd said Then shut your face, and they'd said Make me, and he'd gone for his service pistol. But before the inevitable arrival of the dog unit with the pepper spray, there had been some real friendships made.

Sir Bird preens next to me, tucking feathers into place with a low noise in his throat almost like he’s talking to himself. A slow smile spreads across Finn’s face as he rubs his knuckles—black and blue with several bruises from Sir Bird’s beak. “Let’s see,” he says, flipping through his father’s book. “Here! I’ll need some water in a shallow bowl . . . ink . . . yes, I think this is everything.” He gathers the items, then reads over the entry several times, eyebrows knit in concentration. Dipping his pen in the ink, he whispers strange words while writing on the surface of the water. The ink drips down, elongating the form of the symbols that still hover where he wrote them. I recognize one—change. But the rest I haven’t learned yet. Then, without warning, he lifts up the bowl and dumps the whole thing onto Sir Bird. Only instead of getting wet, as the water washes over his body, Sir Bird’s feathers turn . . . blue. Bright, brilliant, shimmering blue. Squawking in outrage, Sir Bird hops and flies around the room, frantically shaking his feathers. He lands on the desk with a scrabble of clawed feet, then begins trying to bite off the color. “Ha!” Finn says, pointing at his knuckles. “Now you’re black and blue, too!” I can’t help but laugh at my poor, panicking bird. Not to mention the ridiculous pettiness of Finn’s magic show. Picking up Sir Bird, I stroke his feathers and speak softly to him. “Hush now. I’ll make him fix you. You’re still very handsome, but blue isn’t your color, is it?” He caws mournfully, still pulling at his own feathers. “Finn.” He puts his hands behind his back, trying to look innocent. “What? He deserved it.” “He’s a bird. You can’t really find this much satisfaction in revenge against a bird, can you?” His voice comes out just a tad petulant. “He started it.

Elizabeth Sarah Kowalski!" "Whoa," Evan said in a low voice. "How bad does a word have to be to get you middle-named during dirty Scrabble?

She challenged me for a game of Scrabble. I did not refuse. How could I? It was like she was telling me – I want to have a word with you.

Father liked word games. He was fourteen times world Scrabble champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score.

(Excerpt from a standup routine by Matt Graham:) Last Friday, my roommate sent me out to get some canned fish, because we're having some Catholic survivalists over for dinner. Weirdest thing happened. I'm coming up the steps, I stumble, all the groceries fall down the stairs. Except for a can of salmon, which falls up the stairs. Bizarre experience, but it gave me an idea. Couple nights later I was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Cop pulled me over. I told him I was spawning. He said, 'Young man, I have reason to believe you're DUI. You know what that is?' I said, 'Do I!

Michael comes to the door with Frederick. ‘Lucky I was here playing Scrabble,’ Frederick says, as they take Henry off my hands. I follow with the wallet and keys that have fallen from his pocket. ‘My father,’ Henry says as they tumble through the door. ‘My son,’ his dad replies, helping him towards the fiction couch. ‘Amy’s going out with Greg Smith,’ I say to explain why Henry’s drunk. ‘I found him in the girls’ toilets.’ ‘In my defence, I was too drunk to know it was the girls’ toilets,’ Henry says. ‘Go to sleep,’ his dad tells him. ‘It’ll seem better in the morning.’ ‘No offence, Dad,’ Henry says, ‘but unrequited love is just as shit in the morning as it is at night. Possibly worse, because you have a whole day ahead of you.’ ‘No offence taken,’ Michael says. ‘You’ve got a point there.’ ‘They should just kill the victims of unrequited love,’ Henry says. ‘They should just take us out the second it happens.’ ‘That would certainly thin the population,’ Michael says, as he tucks a blanket around him.

Anyway, what can he prove? It’s his word against the Commander’s, unless he wants to head a posse. Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

Wooden scrabble letters offer a whole forest of literature, tiled down for easy shower installment. If you limit your use to only the letters q, u, a, c, and k, your ducks will love what you've done with your bathroom.

Other sources of puzzling words were the science fiction magazines of the times. It was still the bug-eyed space-alien monster era, so these stories featured many languages containing high-value Scrabble letters such as Q, X, and Y.

I do know you.” I’m still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. “It’s me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard—” “Don’t,” he says. His voice breaks on the word. “And I always beat you in Scrabble,” I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. “Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them—” “Don’t.” “And we did, and it wasn’t bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.

Yeah. Kids. Maybe. One day. If I find the right person. You know. One day.” I stare right at her. I couldn’t be any clearer about this if I spelled it out in Scrabble, or if I dragged my finger through the sauces on the plate and wrote the word YOU. But she looks a little nervous. So I ease up on the gas.

Whether to speak or not: the question that comes up again when you think you’ve said too much, again. Another clutch of nouns, a fistful: look how they pick them over, the shoppers for words, pinching here and there to see if they’re bruised yet. Verbs are no better, they wind them up, let them go, scrabbling over the table, wind them up again too tight and the spring breaks. You can’t take another poem of spring, not with the wound-up vowels, not with the bruised word green in it, not yours, not with ants crawling all over it, not this infestation. It’s a market, flyspecked; how do you wash a language? There’s the beginning of a bad smell, you can hear the growls, something’s being eaten, once too often. Your mouth feels rotted. Why involve yourself? You’d do better to sit off to the side, on the sidewalk under the awning, hands over your mouth, your ears, your eyes, with a cup in front of you into which people will or will not drop pennies. They think you can’t talk, they’re sorry for you, but. But you’re waiting for the word, the one that will finally be right. A compound, the generation of life, mud and light.

About 35-40% of the time, a player wants to create a word ending in a specific letter. This, however, is not the way we traditionally think, and, not to mention, this is not the way dictionaries are sorted. In other words, in many situations, conventional dictionaries are not arranged in an easy to use manner. This dictionary solves that problem by sorting on the last letter of the word.

Alex, please.” He balls his fists. “Stop saying my name. You don’t know me anymore.” “I do know you.” I’m still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. “It’s me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard—” “Don’t,” he says. His voice breaks on the word. “And I always beat you in Scrabble,” I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. “Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them—” “Don’t.” “And we did, and it wasn’t bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.” I’m gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I’m reaching for him blindly, grabbing at his collar. “Stop.” He grabs my shoulders. His face is an inch from mine but unrecognizable: a gross, contorted mask. “Just stop. No more. It’s done, okay? That’s all done now.” “Alex, please—” “Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.” “Alex!” He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you.” The air goes. Everything goes. “I don’t believe you.” I’m crying so hard, I can hardly speak. He takes one step toward me. And now I don’t recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.” “Please.” I don’t know how I stay on my feet, why I don’t shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when I want it so badly to stop. “Please don’t do this, Alex.” “Stop saying my name.

Why don’t you ever tell me about my real parents? You’re scared they’ll love me more than you do.” “Asha, we’ve already told you,” her mom says in a cracking voice. “We don’t know anything about them. That’s just the way things worked in India back then.” “And why don’t you ever take me to India? Every other Indian kid I know goes all the time. What is it, Dad—are you ashamed of me? I’m not good enough for your family?” Asha stares at her father, looking down at his hands clenched so tightly the knuckles are drained of color. “It’s not fair.” Asha can’t hold back the tears now. “Everyone else knows where they come from, but I have no idea. I don’t know why I have these eyes that everybody always notices. I don’t know how to deal with this damn hair of mine,” she yells, clenching it in her fist. “I don’t know why I can remember every seven-letter Scrabble word, but none of the periodic table. I just want to feel that someone, somewhere, really understands me!

Open a dictionary at random; metaphors fill every page. Take the word "fathom." for example. The meaning is clear. A fathom is a measurement of water depth, equivalent to about six feet. But fathom also means "to understand." Why? Scrabble around in the word's etymological roots. "Fathom comes from the Anglo-Saxon faethm, meaning "the two arms outstretched." The term was originally used as a measurement of cloth, because the distance from fingertip to fingertip for the average man with his arms outsretched is roughly six feet. This technique was later extended to sounding the depths of bodies of water, since it was easy to lower a cord divided into six-foot increments, or fathoms, over the side of a boat. But how did fathom come to mean "to understand," as in "I can't fathom that" or "She's unfathomable"? Metaphorically, of course. You master something- you learn to control or accept it-when you embrace it, when you get your arms around it, when you take it in hand. You comprehend something when you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it-fathom it. Fathom took on its present significance in classic Aristotelian fashion: through the metaphorical transfer of its original meaning (a measurement of cloth or water) to an abstract concept (understanding). This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't yet been named or so abstract that they cannot be otherwise explained.

But the Athenians did things differently. Their democracy was direct. In other words, they didn’t vote for someone else to turn out and make decisions for them. On days when the Ekklesia – or Assembly – was held, the citizens of Athens walked to the Pnyx, a hill near the Acropolis (and a Scrabble-player’s delight, now that proper nouns are allowed), listened to arguments for and against, say, a military expedition to Syracuse, and then they voted for or against the proposal themselves, by show of hands.

Drax's first reaction was to lurch forward and tear Meyer's cards out of his hand. He faced them on the table, scrabbling feverishly among them for a possible winner. Then he flung them back across the baize. His face was dead white, but his eyes blazed redly at Bond. Suddenly he raised one clenched fist and crashed it on the table among the pile of impotent aces and kings and queens in front of him. Very low, he spat the words at Bond. "You're a che-" "That's enough, Drax!" Basildon's voice came across the table like a whiplash. "None of that talk here. I've been watching the whole game. Settle up. If you've got any complaints, put them in writing to the Committee.

6. The Over-Phobic Excuse Help! There’s a spider¹ under my bed. It’s teasing me because I’m too scared to play Scrabble², Go Fish³, Snap⁴, Twister⁵, Hungry Hippos⁶, Battleships⁷ and Guess Who⁸⁹¹⁰ . . . . . . and then it called me Floccinaucinihilipilification¹¹. AAAAAARGH! ¹Arachnophobia - fear of spiders. ²Verbophobia - fear of words. ³Ichthyophobia - fear of fish. ⁴Ligyrophobia - fear of loud noises. ⁵Chromatophobia - fear of colours. ⁶Phagophobia - fear of swallowing or of eating or of being eaten. ⁷Arithmophobia - fear of numbers. ⁸Peladophobia - fear of bald people. ⁹Pogonophobia - fear of beards. ¹⁰Xenophobia - fear of strangers or foreigners. ¹¹Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia - fear of long words (and hippos).

When we were kids, Fitz was unbeatable in Scrabble. It would drive Eric crazy, because he wasn't used to be bested by Fitz in much of anything. But Fitz had an uncanny memory, and once he saw a word, he wouldn't forget it. [. . .] But Eric wasn't used to be second-best, so he commissioned me into teaching him the dictionary. [. . .] Three weeks after we'd taken on the English language, it rained on a Saturday. "Hey," Fitz suggested, like usual. "Bet I can whip you in Scrabble." Eric looked at me. "Huh," he said, "What makes you think that?" "Um . . . the five hundred and seventy thousand other times I've kicked your ass?" Fitz knew. The moment Eric laid down the letters J-A-R-L and then casually mentioned that it was a term for a Scandinavian noble, Fitz's eyes lit up.

The public had been forced to see [by Kant's writings] that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity.

My personal favorite version of the game, Speed Scrabble, is played with tiles only. Each player selects seven tiles. At the call to start, each player turns over his or her tiles. Using these letters, the player creates an individual grid of six letters, with two or possibly three intersecting words, selecting one letter to pass along. The first player to finish calls out the word switch, passes the rejected tiles to the player at the right, and turns over two new tiles from the general pile. Each player then incorporates the new tiles into his or her grid, always rejecting one to pass along at the word switch. Obvious rejects are Q and Z, which usually get passed around. The game is played until the tiles are depleted and one person calls out the word finished. If no one has any questions about the winner's grid, the points on the tiles are added up. Losers deduct the number of points of the unused letters. Each round takes about fifteen or twenty minutes max...

Driving alone along the Northway, feeling more haunted than I really had the courage to be, I cried in the car the way one does when leaving someone in a bitter and unbearable way. I don't know why I should have picked that time to grieve, to summon everything before me--my own monsterousness, my two-bit affections, three-bit, four. It could have been sooner, it could have been later, it could have been one of the hot, awkward funerals (my grandmother's, LaRoue's, my father who one morning in Vero Beach clutched his fiery arm and fell dead off his chair mouthing to my mother, "Help. Heart. I love you" --how every death makes the world a lonelier place), it oculd have been some other time when the sun wasn't so bright, and there was no news on the raido, and my arms were not laced in a bird's nest on the steering wheel, my life going well, I believed, pretty well. It could have been any other time. But it was then: I cried for Sils and LaRoue, all that devotion and remorse, stars streaming light a million years after dying; I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandmother ailing and stuck in Florida, their rough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory; a jewel box kept in the medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that's where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.

Let me stay in the woods with you,' he said with a huff of breath. I imagined it. Having him share tea with me and Mr. Fox. I could show him the places to pick the sweetest blackberries. We could eat burdock and red clover and parasol mushrooms. At night we would lie on our backs and whisper together. He would tell me about the constellations, about theories of magic, and the plots of television shows he'd seen while in the mortal world. I would tell him all the secret thoughts of my heart. For a moment, it seemed possible. But eventually they would come for him, the way that Lady Nore and Lord Jarel came for me. If he was lucky, it would be his sister's guards dragging him back to Elfhame. If he wasn't, it would be a knife in the dark from one of his enemies. He did not belong here, sleeping in dirt. Scrabbling out an existence at the very edges of things. 'No,' I made myself tell him. 'Go home.' I could see the hurt in his face. The honest confusion that came with unexpected pain. 'Why?' he asked, sounding so lost that I wanted to snatch back my words. 'When you found me tied to that stake, I thought about hurting you,' I told him, hating myself. 'You are not my friend.' I do not want you here. Those are the words I ought to have said, but couldn't because they would be a lie. 'Ah,' he said. 'Well.' I let out a breath. 'You can stay the night,' I blurted out, unable to resist the temptation. 'Tomorrow, you go home. If you don't, I'll use the last favour you owe me from our game to force you. 'What if I go and come back again? he asked, trying to mask his hurt. 'You won't.' When he got home, his sisters and his mother would be waiting. They would have worried when they couldn't find him. They'd make him promise never to do anything like that again. 'You have too much honour.

So, what did you want to watch?’ ‘Thought we might play a game instead,’ he said, holding up a familiar dark green box. ‘Found this on the bottom shelf of your DVD cupboard … if you tilt the glass, the champagne won’t froth like that.’ Neve finished pouring champagne into the 50p champagne flutes she’d got from the discount store and waited until Max had drunk a good half of his in two swift swallows. ‘The thing is, you might find it hard to believe but I can be very competitive and I have an astonishing vocabulary from years spent having no life and reading a lot – and well, if you play Scrabble with me, I’ll totally kick your arse.’ Max was about to eat his first bite of molten mug cake but he paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. ‘You’re gonna kick my arse?’ ‘Until it’s black and blue and you won’t be able to sit down for a week.’ That sounded very arrogant. ‘Really, Max, Mum stopped me from playing when I was thirteen after I got a score of four hundred and twenty-seven, and when I was at Oxford, I used to play with two Linguistics post-grads and an English don.’ ‘Well, my little pancake girlfriend, I played Scrabble against Carol Vorderman for a Guardian feature and I kicked her arse because Scrabble has got nothing to do with vocabulary; it’s logic and tactics,’ Max informed her loftily, taking a huge bite of the cake. For a second, Neve hoped that it was as foul-tasting as she suspected just to get Max back for that snide little speech, but he just licked the back of the spoon thoughtfully. ‘This is surprisingly more-ish, do you want some?’ ‘I think I’ll pass.’ ‘Well, you’re not getting out of Scrabble that easily.’ Max leaned back against the cushions, the mug cradled to his chest, and propped his feet up on the table so he could poke the Scrabble box nearer to Neve. ‘Come on, set ’em up. Unless you’re too scared.’ ‘Max, I have all the two-letter words memorised, and as for Carol Vorderman – well, she might be good at maths but there was a reason why she wasn’t in Dictionary Corner on Countdown so I’m not surprised you beat her at Scrabble.’ ‘Fighting talk.’ Max rapped his knuckles gently against Neve’s head, which made her furious. ‘I’ll remind you of that little speech once I’m done making you eat every single one of those high-scoring words you seem to think you’re so good at.’ ‘Right, that does it.’ Neve snatched up the box and practically tore off the lid, so she could bang the board down on the coffee table. ‘You can’t be that good at Scrabble if you keep your letters in a crumpled paper bag,’ Max noted, actually daring to nudge her arm with his foot. Neve knew he was only doing it to get a rise out of her, but God, it was working. ‘Game on, Pancake Boy,’ she snarled, throwing a letter rack at Max, which just made him laugh. ‘And don’t think I’m going to let you win just because it’s your birthday.’ It was the most fun Neve had ever had playing Scrabble. It might even have been the most fun she had ever had. For every obscure word she tried to play in the highest scoring place, Max would put down three tiles to make three different words and block off huge sections of the board. Every time she tried to flounce or throw a strop because ‘you’re going against the whole spirit of the game’, Max would pop another Quality Street into her mouth because, as he said, ‘It is Treat Sunday and you only had one roast potato.’ When there were no more Quality Street left and they’d drunk all the champagne, he stopped each one of her snits with a slow, devastating kiss so there were long pauses between each round. It was a point of honour to Neve that she won in the most satisfying way possible; finally getting to use her ‘q’ on a triple word score by turning Max’s ‘hogs’ into ‘quahogs’ and waving the Oxford English Dictionary in his face when he dared to challenge her.

Dr. Sperry, after detailed studies of split-brain patients, finally concluded that there could be two distinct minds operating in a single brain. He wrote that each hemisphere is “indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and … both the left and right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.” When I interviewed Dr. Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, an authority on split-brain patients, I asked him how experiments can be done to test this theory. There are a variety of ways to communicate separately to each hemisphere without the knowledge of the other hemisphere. One can, for example, have the subject wear special glasses on which questions can be shown to each eye separately, so that directing questions to each hemisphere is easy. The hard part is trying to get an answer from each hemisphere. Since the right brain cannot speak (the speech centers are located only in the left brain), it is difficult to get answers from the right brain. Dr. Gazzaniga told me that to find out what the right brain was thinking, he created an experiment in which the (mute) right brain could “talk” by using Scrabble letters. He began by asking the patient’s left brain what he would do after graduation. The patient replied that he wanted to become a draftsman. But things got interesting when the (mute) right brain was asked the same question. The right brain spelled out the words: “automobile racer.” Unknown to the dominant left brain, the right brain secretly had a completely different agenda for the future. The right brain literally had a mind of its own. Rita Carter writes, “The possible implications of this are mind-boggling. It suggests that we might all be carrying around in our skulls a mute prisoner with a personality, ambition, and self-awareness quite different from the day-to-day entity we believe ourselves to be.” Perhaps there is truth to the oft-heard statement that “inside him, there is someone yearning to be free.” This means that the two hemispheres may even have different beliefs. For example, the neurologist V. S. Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. Apparently, it is possible to have two opposing religious beliefs residing in the same brain. Ramachandran continues: “If that person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don’t know the answer to that.

Scrabble evenings. He made ADVANCE. She made CONSENT. He made OUT. She made LOVE. The words leapt off the board to watch. #word by manish daswani

SILVERLESS, DE-MAGICKED, AND VOWING NEVER TO PLAY word one-upmanship—or even Scrabble for that matter—with either Adam or Asil (What exactly was a quicquidlibet, anyway?),

You’re not very good at this,” Emma said, laughing at the frustration on Sean’s face. He pulled his hand out from under the back of her T-shirt. “You’re distracting me.” “How am I distracting you?” She shook the bag at Sean, reminding him to pull two letter tiles to replace the C and the T he’d used to make CAT. “You look totally hot. And you did it on purpose so I wouldn’t be able to concentrate and you’d win.” Emma laughed. Sure, she’d thrown on baggy flannel boxers and an old Red Sox T-shirt after her shower just to seduce him out of triple-word scores. “You not having a shirt on is distracting. And you keep pretending you want to rub my back so you can peek at my tile rack.” “Nothing wrong with checking out your rack.” He craned his neck to see better and she shoved him away. It wasn’t easy playing Scrabble sitting side by side on the couch, but after a long workday, neither was willing to take the floor.

Please tell me we don’t have to go all the way upstairs for a condom,” she said. “Back pocket.” She leaned with him as he fished it out, then tried to help him get his jeans down over his hips. Her foot hit the coffee table, which snagged on the throw rug and sent the Scrabble tiles sliding all over the board. She laughed as he tore open the condom packet. “Now nobody wins.” “I was ahead.” He put one hand on her hip, using the other to guide himself into her. “So I win.” Emma moaned as he filled her, bracing herself against the couch with a hand on either side of his head. “The game wasn’t over. It’s a draw.” He pulled down on her hips as he drove up into her, making her gasp. “Ties are for pussies. Admit I won.” She looked down into his blue eyes, crinkled with amusement as he grinned at her. God, she loved…having sex with this man. “One good word isn’t a victory.” “That’s not what the score sheet said.” He stopped moving, and when she tried to rock against him, he held down on her hips so she couldn’t move, either. Then he had the nerve to chuckle at her growl of sexual frustration. “Admit it. I can sit here all night.” “Oh, really?” She went straight for a known weak spot—nipping at his earlobe before sucking it into her mouth. He let go of her hips with one hand, intending to push her mouth away, but she rocked her hips. He groaned and put his hand back. She breathed softly against his ear and then ran her tongue along the outside. “Admit I was going to win,” she whispered, “because I can do this all night.” With one leg, he kicked at the table, sending it over and the letter tiles flying. Before Emma could react, she was on her back on the throw rug with Sean between her legs and her hands held over her head. “I don’t lose.” He crossed her wrists so he could hold them with one hand, then used the other to pull her leg up over his hip so he was totally buried in her. “Give up?” She shook her head, but couldn’t hold back the sigh as he oh, so slowly withdrew almost completely and then just as slowly filled her again. “You’re cheating.” He did it again and again, the slow friction delicious and frustrating, until they were both trembling and on the edge. Then, as he was pulling out of her once again with a self-control that made her want to scream, it became a matter of life or death, because she was going to die if she didn’t get what her body was looking for. “Okay, fine. You win.” He drove into her hard, his fingers biting into her wrists before he released them so he could lift her legs to her shoulder. She cried his name as his fingers dug into her hips and he gave them what they both wanted. When he collapsed on top of her, breathing hard against her neck, she wrapped her legs and arms around him, holding him close. “Another one for the win column,” he said once they’d caught their breath. “It has an asterisk, though, because you totally cheated.” “All’s fair in sex and Scrabble, baby.” He propped his head on his hand and smiled down at her. “What should we play next?” “I’ve still got clothes on. You’ve still got clothes on. Maybe we should break out a deck of cards.” “You’re my kinda girl, Emma Shaw,” he said, and thankfully, he was in the process of getting up off the floor, because she didn’t think she did a good job of hiding how happy those words made her.

Help! There’s a spider¹ under my bed. It’s teasing me because I’m too scared to play Scrabble², Go Fish³, Snap⁴, Twister⁵, Hungry Hippos⁶, Battleships⁷ and Guess Who⁸⁹¹⁰... ...and then it called me Floccinaucinihilipilification¹¹. AAAAAARGH!” ¹Arachnophobia - fear of spiders. ²Verbophobia - fear of words. ³Ichthyophobia - fear of fish. ⁴Ligyrophobia - fear of loud noises. ⁵Chromatophobia - fear of colours. ⁶Phagophobia - fear of swallowing or of eating or of being eaten. ⁷Arithmophobia - fear of numbers. ⁸Peladophobia - fear of bald people. ⁹Pogonophobia - fear of beards. ¹⁰Xenophobia - fear of strangers or foreigners. ¹¹Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia - fear of long words (and hippos).

quixotism is more than a useful Scrabble word,

He was one year older than me, a cynical computer dork with an intense MacBook stare—whenever he’d launch into talking, his turtle-green eyes would get a dark zoom while he rummaged for words, like a hand silently dipping into a Scrabble bag, feeling for the next vowel.

Will you pretty please with brown sugar and cinnamon make a fucking Scrabble word?

If you’ve ever played the word-tile game Scrabble, you know the best way to come up with new words is to mix up the letters in different combinations until a word jumps out at you. In our Second Brain we can do the same: mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges. The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge.

Reggie, please." My pleas seemed to spur him on, his grip on me tightening as he hauled me up even closer to his mouth. I tried to buck against his face, his clever tongue, desperate for more friction, for release. But his hold on me was too strong. He pinned me in place, keeping me right where he wanted me, preventing me from moving at all as he drove the tight coil of pleasure inside me higher, and higher. And then--- He pushed one rough finger inside me, and then another, so tight, the delicious intrusion forcing every sentient thought from my head. I needed this--- him--- all of it. I needed it now. "Hades," he growled against my cunt. "I cannot wait to fuck you." His filthy words, muttered right there, were all I needed to hurdle headlong into orgasm. I scrabbled at the sheets, at Reggie's hair, clinging to anything I could to anchor me as the waves of bliss came again, and again, and again. Reggie coaxed me through it with his lips and tongue, holding me as he urged my body to keep going. I moaned his name, mindless, back arched like a bow above the bed, locked in pleasure that seemed to stretch on forever. When I collapsed to the bed, boneless, he was on me in an instant. "You are so fucking beautiful." His growl was visceral, animalistic. "The way you looked when you came--- fuck. I nearly came too, just from that.

Megadeath: a unit of measure equal to one million human casualites

The emperor looked down at the knife sticking out of his chest in confusion. He dropped the manacles he held and grasped at Jon’s hand clenched around the wooden handle. Ah'puch scrabbled at it with a gasp, but Jon just stared him down, motionless. “Jon?” Ah'puch said, sounding bewildered. “Guards…” The word was just a whisper that trailed off when he remembered that they were alone. Jon pulled the blade out, and it made a sucking sound. Immediately, blood welled up with a slight froth as Ah'puch let out a pained gasp. With a grunt, Jon stabbed the emperor again. And again. And again.

Sometimes, life can feel like Scrabble. You know you’ve got words in there somewhere, but no matter how many times you rearrange the letters, you can’t seem to make sense of the jumble. Then you glance up at the person you’re playing with and see him looking at you, and it’s as if by simply being in your life, he’s introduced you to yourself. And you look back down at your letters and everything you couldn’t see before clicks into place, explained, decoded.

Lex, Bone could have been just some idiot kid with no respect for library property, with nothing to distinguish him or garner any mention in a book. It’s probably not even his real name.” Lex frowned. “That’s true.” “Plus, what makes him a bandit? And why is he sick?” He shook his head. “It’s like he wrote the signature using Mad Libs. He may as well have signed it Spleen, the toasty orange tugboat.” “You’re right,” Lex said, slowly putting something together. “It doesn’t make any sense!” “You say that like it’s a good thing.” “It is!” Goosebumps rippled up her arms as she grabbed a nearby pen and scrap of paper. “It’s a code!” “Or that. Sure.” Lex’s hands were a blur as she wrote. “A simple substitution cipher? One letter for another? Or maybe it needs a keyword. Maybe Bone is the keyword. Is Bone the keyword?” Driggs raised an eyebrow as she scribbled. “This is an interesting side of you I’ve never seen.” “My mom’s a teacher,” she said, staring at the paper without blinking. “Instead of cartoons and video games we got work sheets and word puzzles.” “I see.” He reached in. “Maybe—” “Don’t touch!” “Wow. Okay.” He backed away, stifling a snicker. “I just think you’re overthinking this.” She looked peeved. “Oh, am I, Sherlock?” She offered him the paper. “What do you think it is, just a simple anag—” Her eyes went wide. Next thing Driggs knew, Lex was rummaging around in the closet. “Are you looking for your sanity?” he called after her. “Because I do believe it showed itself out a while ago.” She emerged with a Scrabble box in hand. “Silence,” she said, dumping the tiles on the table. “Let me think.

There is not a scrabble word for how bad I feel." -We Were Liars

On his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773, he used the word ‘depeditation’ in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted he had made the word up, before adding mischievously ‘that he had not made above three or four in his Dictionary’. Horace

An online game of Scrabble Makes you think of many words But when nature calls you leave And beat angry birds

The word “happy” had started to sound wrong in Darcy’s head, like a random collection of Scrabble letters. “What about

Irene forgot to depress the clutch when she keyed the ignition. The I-H lurched forward, then stalled. Luckily it had been rolling the roads of western Maine since the mid-sixties and it was the sedate jump of an elderly mare rather than the spirited buck of a colt; otherwise Chip McAvoy would once more have lost at least one of his plate-glass windows. Oy scrabbled for balance on Jake’s lap and sprayed out a mouthful of turkey along with a word he had learned from Eddie. Irene stared at the bumbler with wide, startled eyes. “Did that creature just say fuck, young man?

Anyway, to me he’s just Sunny. Come on up, Jacks, don’t be shy.” His eyes are wide, and he’s mouthing, “What the fuck?” At me while his friends shove him. “Sunny.” “What’s going on, Starlight?” His words are too quiet for the mic to pick up clearly. “You know I love you. I wouldn’t be here in this amazing city with this fantastic group of ladies if you hadn’t come crashing into my life. Literally.” His laugh has a nervous edge to it. “We might not seem like a perfect match from the outside, but somehow, we work. You make every single day a little lighter, a little more fun, and you drive me freaking insane sometimes.” He smirks. “But I love how you challenge me to be a better person. You make me whole. And so....” I scrabble in the waist pouch Jo passed to me after the bout. “Will you drive me crazy for the rest of our lives? Will you marry me, Jackson?” He leans into the mic. “Are you kidding me, Starlight? Way to steal my thunder.” “What?” I pull back. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans. “I was going to propose to you. I’ve been carrying this around for weeks. It was all planned out.” He pulls out a small grey velvet box. My chest shudders with laughter. “You always were too slow to keep up with me. Better get your skate coach to work on your speed.” “You like it when I take my time.” “Wait. So, is that a yes?” I shove at him to get a little distance. It’s entirely possible I could self combust if he doesn’t give me a bit of space. “No.” I gasp as he drops to one knee. “Starlight. You’re my world. That day I knocked you over at that shitty roller rink was the best day of my life. I say was, because every day I’ve gotten to have you in my life has been a little better, and the day I get to slide my ring on your finger to make it permanent. I can’t wait for that. So, Tasha Scar, will you marry me?” My smile spreads all the way up my face, his eyes falling to the dimple I’ve grown to appreciate. “Fine. But just remember. I asked first.

Played Scrabble. God, so lovely to play Scrabble in the pub with Eva and Alf. I just stared at them, proud that they could spell the odd word, and happy that they wanted to. Not everybody does. Many people never want to play Scrabble or Monopoly or even Guess Who? or anything, but my kids will drop everything for a game of Risk or Boggle or an on-the-spot quiz that I make up, hide-and-seek, even 20 questions, even an arm wrestle. Anything, they are ludic.

Mirren, I can’t even say sorry. There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.

It was fourteen hours later that Marra and the dust-wife flung themselves at the stone lid, scrabbling with all their strength. For a horrible moment, she thought that it would not be enough, that they would have to come back with levers, but it began, inch by agonising inch, to slide. They got it perhaps six inches and had to stop, panting. Fingers slid out of the gap and caught the edge. Marra nearly wept with relief. Fenris shoved the lid aside and sat up, gasping for air. 'You're really here,' he said, bending over so that his forehead touched his drawn-up knees. 'I kept imagining voices, but you're really here this time.' 'We're here,' said Marra, the words this time jabbing her like pins. He took a half dozen sobbing breaths. 'It is very close in there,' he said, 'even with holes.' His face was slick with sweat or tears, Marra did not know. 'Close and cold.' 'I'm sorry,' said Marra. 'I'm sorry. It was the only way I could think of.' She pulled him out of the coffin, or he climbed out and she helped, and he wrapped his arms around her and they stood together, shaking.

Offloading need not require written language, either. At times, offloading may be embodied: when we gesture, for example, we permit our hands to “hold” some of the thoughts we would otherwise have to maintain in our head. Likewise, when we use our hands to move objects around, we offload the task of visualizing new configurations onto the world itself, where those configurations take tangible shape before our eyes. (Picture an interior designer manipulating a model as she tries out new groupings of furniture, for example, or a Scrabble player rearranging the tiles on his tray to form new words.)

I saw a girl who races to help others but doesn’t help herself. And right now you need to help yourself. No one should walk up the aisle feeling inferior or in a different league or trying to be something they’re not. I don’t know exactly who your issues are with, but …” He picks up the phone, clicks a button, and turns the screen to face me. Fuck. It’s my list. The list I wrote in the church. THINGS TO DO BEFORE WEDDING 1. Become expert on Greek philosophy. 2. Memorize Robert Burns poems. 3. Learn long Scrabble words. 4. Remember: am HYPOCHONDRIAC. 5. Beef stroganoff. Get to like. (Hypnosis?) I feel drenched in embarrassment. This is why people shouldn’t share phones. “It’s nothing to do with you,” I mutter, staring at the table. “I know,” he says gently. “I also know that standing up for yourself can be hard. But you have to do it. You have to get it out there. Before the wedding.

Marley’s ghost nodded and stooped over, lifting up a length of the chains and letting Sam scrabble free. Then he threw the chains over one shoulder like a cloak. ‘What’s the story with the chains anyway?’ said Sam, feeling a little emboldened now he was free. ‘Are you on a leash?’ Again the unearthly voice surged up from the black cave of the spectre’s mouth. ‘No,’ said Marley’s ghost. ‘The chains are not to bind me. They are to remind me.’ The word ‘remind’ echoed around the graveyard, bouncing from tombstone to tombstone.

Nesta surged to her feet, staggering across the clearing, blood at her mouth from where he'd hit her, and threw herself to her knees before Cassian. 'Get up,' she sobbed, hauling at his shoulder. 'Get up.' He tried- and failed. 'You're too heavy,' she pleaded, but still tried to raise him, fingers scrabbling in his black, bloodied armour. 'I can't- he's coming-' 'Go,' Cassian groaned. Her powers had stopped hurling the king across the forest. He now stalked toward them, brushing off splinters and leaves from his jacket- taking his time. Knowing she would not leave. Savouring the awaiting slaughter. Nesta gritted her teeth, trying to haul Cassian up once more. A broken sound of pain ripped from him. 'Go!' he barked at her. 'I can't,' she breathed, voice breaking. 'I can't.' The same words Rhys had given him. Cassian grunted in pain, but lifted his bloodied hands- to cup her face. 'I have no regrets in my life, but this.' HIs voice shook with every word. 'That we did not have time. That I did not have time with you, Nesta.' She didn't stop him as he leaned up and kissed her- lightly. As much as he could manage. Cassian said softly, brushing away the tear that streaked down her face. 'I will find you again in the next world- the next life. And we will have that time. I promise.' The King of Hybern stepped into that clearing, dark power wafting from his fingertips. And even the Cauldron seemed to pause in surprise- surprise or some... feeling as Nesta looked at the king with death twining around his hands, then down at Cassian. And covered Cassian's body with her own. Cassian went still- then his hand slid over her back. Together. They'd go together.

I told him there is no Words with Friends in this life: there is only Scrabble, with enemies.

Now, tell me, have you ever heard of upyr? Vampir? Shrtriga?" The words rolled and hissed in his mouth. They reminded me, for no clear reason, of the trip I'd taken with Mr. Locke to Vienna when I was twelve. It'd been February and the city was shadowed, wind-scoured, old. "Well, the name hardly matters. I'm sure you've heard of them in general outline: things that creep out of the black forests of the north and feast on the lifeblood of the living." He was removing the glove from his left hand as he spoke, tugging on each white fingertip. "Lies spread by superstitious peasants, in the main, repeated in story papers and sold to Victorian urchins." Now his hand was entirely free, fingers so pale I could see blue veins threading them. "Stoker should've been summarily executed, if you ask me." And he reached toward me. There was perhaps half a second before his fingertip touched me when all the fine hairs on my arm stood straight and my heart seized and I knew, in a scrabbling, animalish way, that I shouldn't let him touch me, that I should scream for help- but it was too late. His finger was cold against my skin. Beyond cold. An aching, burning, tooth-hurting absence of heat. My body warmth drained desperately toward it, but the cold was ravenous. My lips tried to form words but they felt numb and clumsy, as if I'd been out walking in freezing wind.

I never learned bridge or poker, both of which my mother plays excellently, and despite the fact that I am a total word nerd, I almost always lose at Scrabble. I just don’t do strategy—because I can’t. Strategy demands the deliberate use of perspective taking. I can’t see ahead enough, can’t jump back and forth between the mind of another player and myself.

I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.

Tina tried to focus on her letter tiles and words, letting the other two talk. Megan had a defiant personality—some might call it a disorder—so if Tina put her foot down and officially came out against the guy, Megan would only want him more. Neither of them were trying to play the Scrabble board strategically, so Tina beat them easily. Megan had one of her tantrums and tossed the board on the floor “by accident.” When Megan was in the washroom, Tina whispered to Luca, “She’s a sore loser. Sorry I didn’t warn you about that.” “It must have been fun growing up with a sister,” he said. “You can have her.” “I will. When we get married, she’ll be my sister.” Tina was stunned. Talking about marriage? Already? Luca hadn’t been kidding around when he’d given her his heart to keep forever. She nonchalantly said, “My family is all yours.” Grinning, he pulled her in for a kiss.

dirty-word Scrabble

Listen to all the noise here, the yelling, lockers slamming, loud bells, odd echoes in the halls. The kids are feckless. I need a quiet place, somewhere absent of noise and people. I need a quiet room, a work space without sound. I need to sit in quiet and not think about anything.” The second teacher said, “Did you say feckless?” “Yes.” “A good solid word.” “Thanks. Are you up for a game of Scrabble? We have twenty minutes left.

Show me something." "What would you like to see?" "Anything. Dazzle me with your boring, practical Alben magic." Sir Bird preens next to me, tucking feathers into place with a low noise in his throat almost like he's talking to himself. A slow smile spreads across Finn's face as he rubs his knuckles - black and blue with several bruises from Sir Bird's beak. "Let's see," he says, flipping through his father's book. "Here! I'll need some water in a shallow bowl ... ink ... yes, I think this is everything." He gathers the items, then reads over the entry several times, eyebrows knit in concentration. Dipping his pen in the ink, he whispers strange words while writing on the surface of the water. The ink drips down, elongating the form of the symbols that still hover where he wrote them. I recognize one - change. But the rest I haven't learned yet. Then, without warning, he lifts up the bowl and dumps the whole thing onto Sir Bird. Only instead of getting wet, as the water washes over his body, Sir Bird's feathers turn ... blue. Bright, brilliant, shimmering blue. Squawking in outrage, Sir Bird hops and flies around the room, frantically shaking his feathers. He lands on the desk with a scrabble of clawed feet, then begins trying to bite off the color. "Ha!" Finn says, pointing at his knuckles. "Now you're black and blue, too!" I can't help but laugh at my poor, panicking bird. Not to mention the ridiculous pettiness of Finn's magic show. Picking up Sir Bird, I stroke his feathers and speak softly to him. "Hush now. I'll make him fix you. You're still very handsome, but blue isn't your color, is it?" He caws mournfully, still pulling at his own feathers. "Finn." He puts his hands behind his back, trying to look innocent. "What? He deserved it." "He's a bird. You can't really find this much satisfaction in revenge against a bird, can you?" His voice comes out just a tad petulant. "He started it. Besides, I made it temporary. It'll wear off within the hour." "There now." I kiss Sir Bird's head and set him on my shoulder. "You'll be back to yourself in no time." "Tell him to stop pecking at me.' "Perhaps you deserve it.

Ciao, Violetta.” The sound of his voice, low and almost caressing, is such a shock that for a moment I think I’ve hallucinated hearing it. But as I jerk my head back, I see his shoes, his jeans, and swiftly I swing my legs under me, scrabbling for a foothold in the squishy mud of the riverbank, digging in my toes, and stand up waist-high in the water. Luca has bent his long legs now, and is sitting down in front of me, halfway down the bank on a stone outcropping, so we’re almost level. I stare at him, still disbelieving. “It was you!” I blurt out, and then feel stupid. “Cosa?” He lifts his dark brows. I can see his face clearly in the moonlight, the pale skin, the perfect bone structure, the black lock of hair that falls over his forehead, inky-dark. “Before,” I say. “Up by the club. You were smoking.” He nods. “Which you think is a disgusting habit,” he observes, amusement in his voice. “Yes, I do,” I say firmly, glad of the way the conversation is going; ticking him off is much easier than…anything else. “It’s revolting. Schifoso,” I add, having learned the word in Italian. “Bene.” He pulls the packet from his jeans pocket, raises it to show me, and then, quite unexpectedly, releases it, his long fingers empty, the packet falling into the river beside me. “No more cigarettes,” he says. “Since you say they are schifoso.” “You’re stopping? Just like that?” I fish out the packet before it becomes so waterlogged it sinks, and put it on the grass. He shrugs. “Perchè no?” I swallow. “You shouldn’t just throw things in the water like that. It’s bad for the environment,” I say, sticking with the severe, ticked-off voice, as it makes me feel safe. If I lose this voice with him, I’m in much deeper, more dangerous waters than this pretty little river. “Mi scusi,” he says lightly, an apology with not a flicker of contrition in his voice. “You are good for me, Violetta. The only one who tells me when I do wrong.” When he calls me by the Italian version of my name, I can’t help it: I feel like I’m melting. Dissolving, helpless, gone.

Have you ever seen a blizzard? It’s like the heaviest windstorm you’ll ever see combined with the heaviest snow you’ll ever see. A snowstorm, you could call it. In fact, you could probably replace the word ‘blizzard’ with the word ‘snowstorm’ in most situations and no one would ever notice. Unless, of course, you’re playing Scrabble, in which case I want to know where the second ‘Z’ came from in the first place.

A good thing to do would be to research the few Q words out there that do not need a U