Strange where idle curiosity can get you

Something to say that doesn't fit anywhere else? Voilà!
Post Reply
martyn94
Rank 5
Rank 5
Posts: 2086
Joined: Sun 14 Apr 2013 14:37

Strange where idle curiosity can get you

Post by martyn94 »

I was interested by Pighunter's comment on another thread that he had come back to France on a back route to Maureillas. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and found that the most celebrated current inhabitant had won the world "classic Scrabble" championship a few years ago.

I then looked that up and found that it referred to a subsidiary disclipine in French competitive scrabble: it's competed in a series of normal scrabble games, while the main prizes here go to "duplicate" games (like in bridge) where all players get the same tiles. As you'd imagine, competive scrabble is organised by language because the tile frequencies are different (as I learnt on a wet holiday in the Dordogne many decades ago: there are 5 "k"s in English scrabble, but only 1 in French).

I then found that the many of the top players come from West Africa (both in French and English) and that there seems to be a thriving (semi) academic literature discussing what that shows or doesn't show about innate racial differences in intellect.

I then found that the English-language champion Nigel Richards went on to win the French-language championship essentially from scratch, after a few weeks reading through the French scrabble dictionary.

And I then found that there are 267,751 words in the most-used official English-language scrabble dictionary.

Isn't the interweb wonderful?[/img]
User avatar
Kate
Administrator
Administrator
Posts: 1903
Joined: Fri 23 Sep 2005 19:48
Contact:

Post by Kate »

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
Post Reply