Notes from a self-taught pedant

Two opinion columns in the i newspaper on Wednesday stood out for me. One annoyed me (more of Chloe Westley when I have calmed down), the other had me cheering from the side-lines.

Simon Kelner declared that "making Scrabble easier is pointless". He recalled that he

was brought up in a tough school, Scrabble-wise. My mother was a ferociously competitive player who had no truck with new-fangled words like disco or fridge, or borderline oaths like bum or fart. If you laid down a word which she didn't know, she'd challenge you to define it, and if this didn't correspond to the dictionary definitition, she'd dock you 50 points. She would hate to be alive in a world where emoji (14 points) or yowza (20 points) or zomboid (19 points) was acceptable.

My parents were gentler, and my absorption of language came before Scrabble became popular in Britain, but both were scrupulous in their use of English. I would be pulled up for sloppy use of expressions like "I've no idea" before I went on to speculate about something. The newspapers and magazines which came into the house had high standards, in those golden days of British journalism. There was also a class teacher in Burrage Grove primary in Woolwich, who used to start every day with a spelling quiz. So I am grateful to Mr Punton as well.

Thus I learned that "bacteria" was a single noun, the plural of "bacterium" before I was forced to study Latin in the sixth form, and that "criterion" and "phenomenon" were the correct singulars of those words without having to take on Greek as well. (See previous posts for the loss of "medium" meaning an organ of communication and for "datum".)

Kelner decries the Americanisation of the official Scrabble dictionary, However, the enemy has already breached a gate. Collins, which took over from the still-British Chambers Harrap in sponsoring the official championships, is part of the former Harper and Row, an American publisher, taken over by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. So Collins dictionary is as British as The Sun or The Times.

Personally, I welcome newcomers from the rest of the English-speaking world where they fill a niche or are more colourful than the English English equivalent. Chambers, which is still hanging on by its fingernails in the crossword world (though even here Collins is making inroads) is great at including Scots (like "stooshie"), Australian and New Zealand words. It has even kept its Indian borrowings up-to-date, e.g. "chuddies". However, dragging odd usages in by the hair where there are perfectly good equivalents, simply to make Scrabble easier, is not acceptable.