For Emily

Last night I played Scrabble with my dad. There's a long standing tradition in the Robison family of being extremely competitive in Scrabble, especially considering we're hardly competitive with anyone else.*

This particular match was a bout for the ages. By the second round, I was behind by 20. By the third round, I was behind by 40. By the fourth or fifth, my dad used all his letters and earned a 120 point lead, seemingly ending the game. However, it turned out that his all-letters word was not a word after all (we thought he spelled "crawlers," but he only spelled "crawles"), though neither of us noticed it until his following turn, and that knocked 79 points off his score. Then the tide turned four rounds before the end of the game when I dropped "decade" on a triple word score and took a 20-some point lead that would last the remainder of the game.

I hate it, but it seems that my crushing blows are always dealt on words I didn't even know existed. This time, I was delivered by the word "od." It was the hinge on which "decade" swung, but I had to look it up in the dictionary to confirm its realness. It doesn't appear in dictionary.com, but it's all too prominent in some American Standard Whatever Dictionary. The definition: a hypothetical substance that has something to do with something or other. I'm sorry, I don't have the dictionary in front of me. But it's real, I swear.



*This is not to say that I am undefeated or that I consistently crush everyone. I have made mistakes as great as saying "create" is not a word and pronouncing it "creet," as well as losing disastrously to a team of three friends because Will and I had somewhere around six consonants for the entire game. But in general, the Robisons are a Scrabble force of epic proportions.