I wasn't as shocked as many others apparently were when, on Tuesday morning, I read that the rules of Scrabble were being changed to allow the use of proper nouns.
This is because I don't know what a proper noun is. Or at least I had to think about it for a few minutes, and by that time the horror factor had diminished.
I don't know the definitions of most parts of speech. I know what nouns and verbs are, but that's about the end of it. Nor do I understand the rules of grammar. I write by ear, and my ear was trained mostly by reading and because as a child my parents fined me 50 cents for every grammatical error I made in conversation.
As a result, even though I was among the worst students for most of the few years that I attended school, I was well-spoken enough that other children understood I could still be beaten up like a Chess Club nerd whenever they felt the urge.
"There's kids beating me up on the way home," I'd tell my mother when I arrived at the kitchen door, dishevelled.
"There are kids beating me up on the way home, I think you mean. 'Kids' is plural," my mother would correct me, making a note on the fridge to dock my allowance. "And kids are baby goats," she'd add, upon reflection, recalculating the amount owed. Battered and broke I mostly was, living in an unjust world.
It did no good to ask the Bully Children to please exempt me from their intellectual class war on the grounds that I, too, was a loser. Possibly it made matters worse.
"Haven't you noticed that I'm just as big a failure as you are?" I'd ask my tormentors, struggling to rise from a snowbank. "Why, I sit right beside you in Idiot Math, Lynn. And you, Kelly, we were thrown out of Geography for People Who Will Never Go Anywhere together, remember? Surely that should count for something."
"Ha-ha," she said.
"'Surely,'" someone would sneer, deftly returning me to the snowbank.
I had difficulty in school mostly because I'm learning-disabled. This is a vague term attached to a wide spectrum of disorders that cause significant difficulties in the acquisition of knowledge in a typical manner or the processing of information, the most damaging of mine possibly being that I don't understand Daylight Saving Time. I don't understand why we do it, I can't remember when to do it, nor can I perform the necessary mechanical operations on my clocks and appliances to make it happen.
The truth is that for six months of the year I have to go outside to my car to check what time it is. Also, I can't spell, do even basic math or worry about Scrabble niceties.
Of course, within hours of the Great Scrabble Panic heralding civilization's end, it was noticed by the press that the rules were being altered only for a new edition of Scrabble, Trickster Scrabble, to be available only in Britain.
This is rather like the later versions of Trivial Pursuit where all the questions were about Jesus Christ Superstar. It's hardly worth getting upset about.
There's no Scrabble Stasi anyway. Most people play by their own house rules. I know we do.
The use of a dictionary - as in, "It'd be great if 'adze' were a word. Hey, it is!" - is encouraged in our house. In fact, mostly the children and I play Scrabble: Insecure Edition, wherein we give each other letters so that our board will make us all look smarter should the neighbours drop by.
When we play, no one puts "bee" on a Triple Word Score. One only has to say, "I'm hoping to put 'huisache' there as soon as I secure a second H," and someone will donate it.
I understand that proper names might be a problem in Trickster Scrabble. Beyoncé was an example given, and of course any word can be a name (see Beyoncé). But what if we were allowed to use only the names of people with pages on the Internet Movie Database (like Beyoncé)? Problem solved.
Let's have more ways to engage each other and fewer barriers for those who might be approaching language, knowledge, art or Scrabble from a different angle.
Although for some Scrabble players, the barriers may be half of the fun.