The Wordsmith

by Chris Sinacola

"VUM, 'TIS A WHITE WHALE, CAPTAIN!"

It is safe to say that the advent of the OWL-2 lexicon on March 1, 2006, was greeted with a mixture of delight and dread by North American SCRABBLE players. Some veterans greeted the “new” words with a groan. Some beginners of the “Wordfreak” generation quickly concluded that there was no pity in the SCRABBLE maelstrom after all and are said to have taken up checkers or Sudoku.

Those of us who remain and play the majority of our SCRABBLE under the stern eye of the OWL-2 may love it or hate it, but we have little choice but to study it. How we do so is as varied as our SCRABBLE community itself. This column will offer some reflections on language and the words we love — their meanings, derivations, and appearances in literature. Artwork may be provided on occasion by one or another of my daughters, whose talents also extend to an indulgence of their father’s SCRABBLE habit. More or less.

Among the “new” threes that caught my eye three years ago was VUM, a godsend to those of us (perhaps all of us?) with a penchant for pulling U and V from the bag on the same turn. I thought it a useful enough addition to the lexicon, although it takes no S.

But it’s hardly new.

Readers of Moby-Dick may recall Ishmael’s adventurous evening at the Spouter-Inn, where he seeks refuge from a stormy night and learns that he will have to share a room with the pagan harpooner, Queequeg.

Innkeeper Peter Coffin assures the irresolute narrator: “I vum it’s Sunday — you won’t see that harpooneer tonight; he’s come to anchor somewhere — come along then.... ” Moby-Dick was published in 1851, but vum, which the Oxford English Dictionary identifies as a U.S. colloquialism, appeared as early as 1785 in the Massachusetts Spy, published in my native Worcester: “We must all dreadful mindful be / That we must fight for liberty / And vum we’ll ‘fend it, if we die.”

I feel the same about newspapers, personally.

Vum aside, it’s worth noting that Melville is among the many authors who — while born long before Alfred Butts devised SCRABBLE — force the SCRABBLE-addicted reader to keep a lexicon near to hand. I have no estimate as to how many of my own would-be reading hours have been detoured into lexicon-study hours, but I fear the number is considerable — and yet, apparently not enough. At a one-day tournament in North Salem, New York a year or more ago, I lost a close game by leaving VUM wide-open for the inevitable front hook of O. This against a double-blank rack, mind you. Hm.

But then, we Scrabblers, as monomaniacal in some respects as Captain Ahab himself, do well to remember that the voyage is the thing. I don’t mean to depress you, but most of us are destined for the tryworks long before we’ll ever manage to land the White Whale of SCRABBLE greatness.

Here are 10 words found in Moby-Dick. Can you identify which are acceptable and which are not?

HYPERBOREAN
JEROBOAM
GOGGLING
PITCHPOLING
SKRIMSHANDER
LOOMINGS
GLIM
HYPOS
PHRENSY
LAZARUS

Chris Sinacola is a NASPA member, newspaper editorial writer, and occasional SCRABBLE tournament participant.