A F H L S

[muckefuck]

Among the games played last night was one I didn't mention, Scrabble Flash. This is a set of five small boxes each with an LCD display. At the start of each round, a letter appears in each box and you have something like ten seconds to arrange the letters to spell an English word. If you fail, the boxes flash the message "OUT" before revealing the answer; if you succeed, the message is "NEXT" and you can either pass the the boxes along to the next player or play another round yourself. (I don't know if there's any internal mechanism for keeping score or whether or not there is only one acceptable answer in each round.)

Plurals seemed common in the score or so rounds we played. This led to some odd results, such as when JB got "BILES". Sure, that's a legitimate word form but we questioned whether it would ever appear in English outside of specialist literature. Everyone seemed willing to validate my claim of being handicapped by my multilingualism, which more than once caused me to see words which were perfectly acceptable in something other than English. But my real trouble was not this tendency per se but rather not being able to shake an invalid word once it was lodged in my brain, and that was something we all suffered from. For instance, one of my first sequences was something like B R A O T. Of course, I immediately saw "BORAT" and, try as I might, could not unsee it. Then there was the problem of "reverse dislexia", where your mind would fool you into thinking you had the letters in a different order than you did, as when Bear Cookbook spelled "SIWPE" and couldn't understand why the programme wouldn't accept it.

Not something I could imagine playing for hours on end, but it made for a nice break between games of strategy. I speculated on the possibility of foreign language editions. Differences in average word length would, I think, be an obstacle. Give the typical length of English words, five characters seems a reasonable trade-off between portability on the one hand and playability on the other; I don't know that the same would be true even for such closely-related languages as German and French.

Comments

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

That sounds fun! However, I'm totally infuriated that the sample image doesn't make a word.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

What do you mean? Past participle of remp "to go hastily".

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Or, in re your earlier problem, tremp, to dip your madeleine in coffee while gazing wistfully out a window.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

OED gives that as an obsolete verb meaning "to mix, temper". But all I think of when I see it is the town in Catalonia.