"MANY tweeps have bezzies and discuss cakeages.
Dench."
Yes, that made you spit out your morning bridie. What am I talking about? That is a good question, well put. Quite frankly, before I began penning this article or piece, I'd have possessed few clues myself as to the content of my cogitation.
Permit me, therefore, to explain rapidly: my opening bombshell sentence consists of words now permitted by the Collins Official Scrabble dictionary.
You'll ken fine what Scrabble is: yon daft board game in which you get points for words, with higher scores for deploying difficult letters.
I think that's the gist. In all honesty, I haven't played Scrabble since the latter quarter of the last century. I don't excel at board games, nor indeed at any aspect of life requiring strategy, and I remember Scrabble was one of many competitions I never, ever won.
"But you're supposed to be good at words," I recall people saying. To which I thought for a space of three minutes before replying: "Gie's peace, ken?"
Scrabble was designed 77 years ago by Alfred Mosher Butts, a moniker that deserves a few points in itself. For "tweep" (a person who uses Twitter), incidentally, you get 10 points. "Bezzy" means best friend and, in the singular, is worth 18 points. "Cakeages" (15 points) I like. It refers to a restaurant's charges for serving cake brought in from outside. I didn't even know that was possible.
Before I go further, some of the points totals provided (or copied) here don't make sense to me so, if the numbers are wrong, do write in. And I use "do" in its ancient Etruscan sense of "don't".
"Dench" (11 points), as you might imagine, means excellent. Other newly allowed words will be more familiar to those of us in the normal population: "cakehole", which is surely Edwardian at least; "onesie", the absurd one-piece garment designed by scientists to put husbands off sex; "ridic" for ridiculous (where have these been people been living for the last 77 years?); and "vape", the practice of inhaling the germs from electronic cigarettes.
I suppose the point is that, hitherto, cakehole has been deemed rude or brusque, while ridic isn't really kosher, so to say, but a mere contraction deployed by the hoi polloi.
"Lolz" refers to laughing, generally online, by people who simply will not move on. There's "newb" for newbie and "obvs" for obviously. Obviously. "Shizzle" is a form of US rap slang, and therefore of no interest to civilisation, while "tuneage" is rather a good word for music.
"Twerking", according to my researchers, is a rapid movement of the bottom, deployed for dancing purposes. I see. "Sexting", as you well know (from reading about it in court cases), is the practice of sending explicit text messages about bottoms and so forth. Other words of fairly obvious import include hacktivist, hashtag, shootie, waah and yeesh. So it goes. Yada and, if I may say so, yada.
Incidentally, if you think the above words are ridic, consider that, in the American National Scrabble Championship last year, legitimately deployed words from the lexicon included "qua", "wab", "trooze", "houri" and "kibi". Unless qua is from Latin, I've no idea what these mean, and I make you this solemn vow: I shall never use them in print again, unless in error or while unaccountably inebriated.
A lady at the back has raised her hand. Yes, madam? "I'm far too busy for this sort of thing." Yes, I get your gist or pith.
But there may be some point to it all. Being able to babble at Scrabble is said to improve the mental abilities considerably, not least because it involves thinking ahead and strategy, a practice that this column so breezily deplored earlier.
On the down side, it also inspires competitiveness. According to an article in Scientific American magazine, seriously competitive Scrabble players devote five hours a week to memorising words from the game's official dictionary. Still, it's nice to have an obsession.
Let me conclude or peter out by pointing out that I approve of new words. Language must evolve to take account of the latest phenomena, such as yonder internet, and the creativity involved strikes me as joyful. Alas, I fear you have to be hip to deploy many of these latest additions.
I cannot, in all honesty, foresee a situation in which - drunk, sober or even giving evidence in court - the word "shizzle" shall ever pass my lips.
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