Earlier this week, my father asked to borrow my copy of Scrabble. Technically, he didn't ask to borrow my copy; he asked to borrow his copy which he claimed that I kept when he abandoned it during one of his moves. If I did such a thing, I would think that would make it my copy now, but none of that is really the point.

As it turns out, I had four copies of Scrabble in our games closet, two copyright dated 1953, one 1989, and one 1999. I assume these once belonged to my mother, my father, and my long lost brother. That accounts for the '53 and '99 boards. Is the '89 board mine? I don't recall ever owning my own Scrabble board. Am I a chronic Scrabble kleptomaniac?

More importantly, while investigating the contents of the four sets, I discovered that all have the correct number of 100 tiles, all except for the oldest. It has 100 tiles, but not the correct 100. It is missing one O₁ and one X₈. In their place it has instead two tiles that must have come from yet another old set (one N₁ and one Z₁₀) that have been crossed through with pencil and O₁ and X₈ penciled on the other side. It sure looks like my handwriting, but that can't be right, can it? (An amnesiac Scrabble graphomaniac?)

Now my problem is that my broken brain is bothered by the fact that I own one incomplete Scrabble set. I have a terrible compulsion to go online and buy one vintage O₁ and one vintage X₈. That would be stupid. I have three perfect good Scrabble sets, and even the bad one is playable. No one in my house has even opened a Scrabble box in at least a decade. (No offense to Scrabble. It's a great game. But most of our board games were played by me and my brother, and as I said: "long lost.") If only I could stop thinking about it. I've become a psychoneurotic Scrabble monomaniac!

Some kids have monsters under their beds keeping them awake at night. I now have two tiny wooden tiles in my gaming closet. Damn Dad and his desire to play word games.

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A random thought while doing the dishes: Why is unwise a word but unsmart isn't?

Unsmart does not appear in the dictionary on my desk, my trusty Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged (which I still use deep into the 21st century because I don't want to grow up, I'll always be a 20th-century kid). Unwise is also nowhere to be seen in either The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd College Edition we keep upstairs or my copy of The Official Scrabble® Players Dictionary, Second Edition. If it's not in the Scrabble® Dictionary, it's not a real word.

However, the Internet has never cared about reality. Merriam-Webster online recognizes "unsmart" as meaning exactly what you would think it means (i.e. "not smart"), but their example for how to use the word comes from the October 18, 2022 issue of Elle magazine:

Tweets swimming reports from Barton Springs pool; carries an unsmart phone so as not to be distracted by the internet; has lived in France; and read Anna Karenina in 16 hours.

So in this case unsmart means essentially landline. That's nothing like unwise (in word or deed).

Elsewhere, the online Oxford English Dictionary also has an entry for unsmart, going so far as to quote itself when it says "OED's earliest evidence for unsmart is from before 1500, in the writing of Robert Henryson, poet." Curiously, that citation is absent from the Online Etymology Dictionary, but I looked up The Complete Works of Henryson at the University of Rochester's Robbins Library and did find this in the "Prologue" of his 1480s work Fables, lines 22-25:

For as we se, ane bow that ay is bent
Worthis unsmart and dullis on the string
Sa dois the mynd that ay is diligent
In ernistfull thochtis and in studying.

As you can see, that is not English. (Henryson wrote like what he was: a Scotsman.) It's Middle English, where smart had nothing to do with intelligence but a "stinging, sharp pain." In other words, in this case unsmart is akin to relax. I wouldn't say that's unwise either.

So call someone dumb, but don't call them unsmart lest you sound stupid.

Next time: Why is uncharismatic a word but unfortitudinous isn't? Actually, wait. No, this one makes sense. Never mind.

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Today's seasonal grammar lesson: The word 'tis means the same as the word it's. Both are contractions of it is, and in both cases the apostrophe replaces a missing letter i.

When they both first appeared around the 16th century, 'tis meant the same thing it does today, but it's was originally used as the possessive form of the gender-neutral third person singular it. After it's gradually became its (for unclear reasons), it's replaced 'tis (for unclear reasons). Now, if you erroneously type it's when you mean its, someone will snidely correct you in your comments section.

While we're on the subject, 'twas means it was and 'twere means it were, neither of which anyone ever contracts anymore, but I'm starting to think we all should. On the other hand, I think it wise to let 'tbe remain an unwhispered word.

Interestingly, both 'tis and 'twas appear with appropriate apostrophes and modern definitions in the 1806 first edition of Noah Webster's Compendius [a. ſort, brief, conciſe, ſummary] Dictionary. Comparatively, it, its, and it's are entirely omitted. (At least *I* think that's interesting.)

By the way, the only time you can get away with dropping the apostrophe from 'tis and 'twas is if you're playing Scrabble®, but that's because The Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary recognizes tis as the "the seventh tone of the diatonic musical scale" and twas as meaning "two." Sorry, Scrabblers, but twere is still not a legally recognized play.

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