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Chanda Chisala has written a series of articles for this website, dealing with the strong performance of many Nigerians and other black Africans in competitive Scrabble. He argues that this fact invalidates the poor results of African populations in IQ tests, his key point being that you have to be very smart to excel at this game.
The series provoked a flood of commentary and dispute. Most of it was civil, but Chisala and his critics often seemed to be talking past each other. A big part of the problem, from my perspective, was that they didn’t really know what they were talking about.
I am not writing either to support or to assail Chisala’s position. I am no expert in intelligence testing; I could do no more than rehash the arguments of others. I am, however, an expert in Scrabble itself. Over several years of tournament play earlier in this century, I more than held my own against the best players in North America. My purpose here, then, is to shed light on a subject that seems very obscure to those who pontificate about it.
On becoming a database
The most salient aspect of Scrabble proficiency is, of course, knowing the words. Chisala seems to believe that this amounts to memorizing the dictionary, and none of his critics have contradicted him on the point. This perception is incomplete and quite misleading, so I need to correct it before I can convey to you enough true understanding of the game for you to discuss it intelligently.
Skilled Scrabble players don’t study words. We study alphagrams, and learn to associate them with the words they form. I personally have never used a Scrabble dictionary or wordlist for any purpose other than checking a word for validity when judging a challenged play.
An alphagram is a set of n letters, possibly including duplicates. Typically the letters are ordered alphabetically for reference and study, although some players prefer to separate vowels from consonants. Most alphagrams have no permutations which form valid words; these are generally not worth studying. Most of the rest have only a single valid permutation, but some form sets of two or more anagrams. For example, the seven-letter alphagram AEINRST forms many valid words (the exact number depends on the dictionary chosen), among them common English words such as NASTIER and RETAINS, as well as obscurities such as ANESTRI.
The most efficient way for a human to absorb the huge number of alphagrams needed for competitive Scrabble is to study flashcards. One side of the card contains the alphagram, and the other contains all of its valid permutations. Some players have complete sets of physical cards, which can be quite bulky, but more often a suitable computer program is used for study.
Many Scrabble players, even some good ones, consider “anagramming,” the process of finding valid words in an alphagram, to be a serious mental challenge, perhaps the core of the game itself. When studying, they’ll stare at an alphagram, possibly rearranging the letters, until they either find the word(s) or give up in frustration and flip the card over to the answer. Under timed game conditions, they try the same thing, but without the benefit of their flashcards. Obviously, this is far from optimal. When I was competing I took a radically different approach. In my study regimen, I always strove for instantaneous recognition of valid words. For example, AAFIRUY might come up in the deck I was studying. If I didn’t see RUFIYAA within a second or two, that card would be repeated the next day, and the day after, and so on, as many times as needed until the mental mapping from alphagram to word became second nature.
The reasons for this practice become clear when you know that the strategic aspects of play – deciding which word to play, where to put it, when to forego points in favor of a better “leave” of synergistic tiles, etc. – constitute the main difference in results between players who know most or all of the words. Each player is allotted only 25 minutes on the game timer. The more time he spends “anagramming,” looking for words that may or may not be there, the less time he has for the decisions that really matter. As a result of my study method, I could confidently rule out any letter combination if I didn’t see a word in it quickly, as well easily challenge my opponents’ invalid plays. I don’t believe I had much greater strategic understanding than most of my opponents in the top divisions of tournaments, but my results were better due to having more time available to apply that understanding.
The tenuous connection of all this to actual language
As for the question of whether verbal acuity is necessary, helpful, or even detrimental to Scrabble excellence, I can offer the following. My vocabulary is uncommonly extensive for a survivor of American public schools, yet there are a huge number of “Scrabble words” that I know, but whose meanings in English elude me. It is indeed possible, as Chisala has pointed out in his discussion of French Scrabble, to excel in this game without any proficiency in the underlying language. But that proficiency can’t hurt Scrabble performance, despite some players’ superstitions, and in some minor aspects it may help.
Meanings don’t matter much, but knowing parts of speech can be useful, as well as having some idea of a word’s etymology and, in the case of a foreign-derived word, its language of origin. All nouns can be pluralized, sometimes producing Scrabble-valid absurdities such as DEADS (as in “the dead of night”). Knowing that a word is a noun or verb, even if you don’t know its meaning, can help you remember whether a “hook” of -S, or additionally -D for a verb, to the word’s end is allowed. These are not hard and fast rules, but useful mnemonic aids, and memorizing the exceptions is less arduous than learning the hooks to each word individually. Verbs can be conjugated in the usual ways, and adjectives usually have comparative and superlative forms, helping to determine the validity of longer words that you may not have studied yet, or to extend a word already on the board.
Most of the short words ending in -AE come from Scots, and are either prepositions or verbs that take forms irregular in English. Reading Robert Burns can actually improve your Scrabble. Words ending in -EAU are of French origin and can be pluralized with an -X, but remembering which ones can instead take an -S is tricky. Many Italian-origin words take the unusual front S- hook. Physical units having to do with electricity can be prefixed with an AB-. Hebrew words ending in -OT are already plural and don’t take the final -S, but do take an -H. The same is true of -IM words, but without the -H. As for German and Latin … don’t get me started.
In sum, I must say that my strong command of English, along with scattered bits of knowledge of other languages, did benefit my Scrabble play, but the effect was mild, manifesting itself chiefly in ready mnemonic devices. A minimally literate coder-type with strong memory and logical skills could still do very well in this game without being hampered by his lack of verbal fluency.
Math? What math?
A claim often made by Chisala and the authors he cites is that Scrabble is “a math game, not a word game.” But the evidence for this claim is basically circumstantial, amounting to the observation that many excellent Scrabble players are also experts in math or related fields. Let’s look at the mathematics actually used in the game, so you can judge for yourself.
The math involved in the everyday play of Scrabble is simple arithmetic, consisting of addition and multiplication operations on small whole numbers. No single tile has a point value higher than 10, and the multiplier squares on the board introduce factors of 2 and 3. A player lucky enough to cover two triple-word squares in a single turn will need to be able to multiply by 9. Add together the scores of each word you make in a play, plus a 50-point bonus for a “bingo” if you use all seven of your tiles. Keep a running total for each player by adding the score of the current play to his cumulative game score, which will be a three-digit number after a few turns of play.
That’s it. Most kids learn this stuff before they’re tall enough to ride the rollercoaster. This sort of arithmetic was routinely mastered by not-very-bright store clerks in the days before computerized cash registers, though their descendants now atrophy their own brains with smartphones.
There are situations where somewhat higher-level math is useful, though it can’t be applied effectively during the game itself. I’ll give a simple example. Suppose we have a choice between two plays fairly close in value. But the stronger play slots an “A” next to a triple-letter square, which will offer our opponent a high-scoring counterplay if he has the single “Z.” Knowing the probability of this is worthwhile. With a basic understanding of combinatorics, the calculation is conceptually simple, but far too unwieldy to carry out mentally if there are many tiles left in the bag. In practice, an experienced player will have heuristics for handling such situations. Because I had spent a few hours with a spreadsheet generating numerical answers for many scenarios of this type, mine may well have been better than those that my rivals had developed through experience and guesswork. But there was nothing really clever in what I did, and I don’t believe it gave me a great advantage. After my opponents had spent a few years practicing and honing their strategic heuristics with the then-new Scrabble AI “Quackle,” that advantage may have vanished entirely.
The spatial factor: why Jews aren’t actually the best
Chisala’s assertion of Jewish dominance in Scrabble does not withstand scrutiny. While it is true that a disproportionately large fraction of excellent Scrabble players are Jewish, the very best of the best are not, and they’re not black African either. They are Gentiles of Eurasian descent, and I have a simple explanation.
Scrabble players call it “board vision,” and Jews tend not to be very good at it. The most difficult Scrabble plays are bingos of nine or more letters, so that they must be played through at least two tiles on the board. Seven-letter bingos can be identified just from the tiles on one’s own rack, while eights intersect a single tile on the board. A dedicated studier of alphagrams will find the great majority of these. Nines introduce an enormous leap in difficulty. Even a player who has studied nine-letter alphagrams and knows the words thoroughly will miss them more often than not. Though not rare, they are rather uncommon, and actively looking for them will usually burn up too much clock time to be worth the effort. They mostly just have to be seen, by talent or serendipity. Computers, of course, never miss them. This can be very humbling.
This talent must be closely related to the so-called “visuospatial intelligence” that Chisala mentions on a few occasions, in which the brighter-than-average Ashkenazi Jewish population tests at a level significantly below the European average, which in turn falls short of East Asian performance. This may just be semantic nitpicking on my part, but I wouldn’t call it a form of intelligence. In a Scrabble setting, at least, it’s more a form of awareness.
Nigel Richards, the most accomplished Scrabble player ever, has more of this awareness than any other human I know of, if the recorded games I’ve seen are representative of his typical play. The one man who may possibly be better at Scrabble than Richards, by virtue of having a winning record against him over a significant number of games, is, ironically for Chisala’s theories, as black as a typical Bantu. But Ganesh Asirvatham’s name is Hindu and his appearance Dravidian, so presumably he is much closer genetically to the Anglo-Saxon Richards than to the Igbo and Yoruba champions of Nigeria.
Scrabble rewards a quick, alert mind and a capacious memory, along with the dedication necessary to maintain the player’s interest through hundreds, even thousands, of grueling hours of study before he can properly apply those talents to the game. A few dozen people at a given time, perhaps a low three-digit number in total over the history of the game, have made it that far. We tend to be bright, sometimes even brilliant. But intelligence, strictly speaking, is not what separates Nigel Richards from us. Nor is it memory, contrary to common assumption. The point of departure seems to be an uncanny spatial sense, one which allows its owner to easily see the exceptionally challenging plays that come up once every few games, plays which the dozens of merely excellent players will usually miss.
Endgames: thinking required
Serious players generally use a scoresheet printed with the distribution of letters in the game’s tile set, crossing out letters as they are played. Once the bag is empty, each player can quickly know exactly which tiles are on his opponent’s rack. The element of chance, very important in the earlier stages of the game, has vanished. Logic prevails.
With the great majority of tiles having already been played, the board tends to be “closed,” lacking open lines of fire for long words. Available plays are predominantly short words, which are both more familiar and easier to find for most players. A word-finding savant will see that his advantage has disappeared against an opponent with mediocre vocabulary and spatial skills, but a greater degree of what ordinary people, not privy to the jargon of a contentious subfield of psychology, might naively call intelligence.
Scrabble endgames, though comparable to chess endgames in the sense of being deterministic, cannot be learned by rote. The variety of board configurations is far too great. A common thread is often the presence of a hard-to-play tile on one player’s rack, and the other player’s efforts to “stick” him with it by blocking the squares where the few possible words containing that letter might be placed. Endgame skills can be improved with practice, but ultimately an optimal solution can only be found reliably through exhaustive search of a space too large for unaided humans to cover in a short time. Computers will always be much better at this.
Brain failure modes, and a surprising conclusion
I hope I’ve made it adequately clear that the dominant mental factors in Scrabble performance are long-term memory and recall speed, spatial awareness, and logic. The verbal and mathematical aspects of what the psychometric community defines as “intelligence” are relatively minor factors. Here I aim to show you just how minor.
I am a night owl by nature, seldom at my best before noon. Grogginess due to lack of sleep often hindered my Scrabble performance severely. Caffeine and appropriate food helped to counteract this, but not nearly enough. My Scrabble tournament results were mostly either superb or lousy, with little middle ground.
I can arise early and due routine physical or mental work well enough, but with my mind foggy I don’t have the mental energy to hold a train of thought long enough for real problem-solving. My physical strength is impaired slightly, but balance and awareness of my surroundings suffer far more. I postpone intense physical exercise until later in the day; trying to clean a barbell in the morning is a recipe for a muscle strain or worse. The same tunnel vision that makes morning weightlifting dangerous for me has disastrous effects on my ability to “see” Scrabble words. Precisely the mental factors most valuable for Scrabble excellence – that is, logic and spatial – are hit hardest when I haven’t slept well.
On the other hand, my verbal and math abilities didn’t seem to suffer much. An entirely unrelated experience will help me to corroborate this quantitatively: the GRE General exam, which was, conveniently for self-examination of my mental lapses, broken down into verbal, math, and logic sections, each scored separately.
I took the General GRE in 2001. A few weeks before I was scheduled to take it, the testing company sent me an informational packet including a CD-ROM with a full practice exam, presumably intended to familiarize testees with the format. I completed this practice exam one afternoon, having recently bicycled a few miles over flat pavement and eaten a light meal. I scored 730 on the verbal section, and the maximum of 800 on each of the other two. The math section was all high school-level material, and I easily finished it with ample time to spare. The only difficulty I encountered in the verbal section stemmed from my ignorance of a few of the words used in the analogies. The logic section required a good deal of focused mental effort and scratch paper, but I finished in the allotted time with no mistakes.
The night before the exam, I was unable to sleep until 2 a.m., my mind churning over a difficult physics assignment rather than this standardized test that I didn’t really care about. After my alarm clock woke me at 5:30, I ate a quick breakfast and picked up a carless friend. Unaccustomed to classes or other requirements before noon, we hurried to arrive by 8 at the testing center in the nearest big city, about a 70 mile drive through the early stages of rush hour traffic. I took the GRE on less than 4 hours of sleep and a good deal of stress. While my verbal and math scores were exactly the same as they had been on the practice exam taken under nearly ideal conditions, I was unable to finish the logic section in time, scoring only 700, a drop from the 99th percentile to somewhere in the eighties. I knew how to solve all the problems presented to me, but pushing my brain to perform the needed operations was like driving a car with an obstruction in the transmission’s valve body: it just wouldn’t get into higher gear.
I competed in Scrabble tournaments under similar conditions many times. Evidently, my verbal and math skills, those that are supposed to lead to Scrabble success, are unaffected by levels of fatigue that make me a public safety hazard with a steering wheel in my hands. But my tournament results correlated quite strongly with the hours I had slept the prior night. In fact, the disparity between the rested and fatigued versions of me was even greater than it appears. Scrabble tournaments with large fields use a “Swiss” pairing system that matches players with similar ranks in the tournament standings. On average, then, a winning player will face stronger opposition than a loser. Given the bimodality of my results, that meant that I was either beating winners or losing to losers. I’m a lifetime winner against the elite players of the Pacific region: Dave Wiegand, Carl Johnson, and Conrad Bassett-Bouchard; and a loser against a lot of scrubs who I won’t embarrass by mentioning their names here.
My mediocre, but not awful, performance on the GRE’s logic section while tired and stressed shows that even my logical abilities (what I would consider to be actual “intelligence”) don’t drop precipitously as long as I’m able to keep my eyes open. This suggests that explicit, deductive reasoning is only a secondary factor in Scrabble performance. My experience with the game bears that out: logic, properly speaking, plays a key role only in the endgame. Play during the game’s earlier phases, where random draws and incomplete information create a greater similarity to poker than to chess, relies mainly on heuristics developed through playing experience and computer simulation. I believe the current version of Quackle does have Bayesian inference capability, but can only use it effectively when the bag is nearly empty. You can’t expect even that from a human.
I can’t imagine that memory lapses were a significant factor in the variability of my performance. Once words were on the board, I had no trouble recognizing them as valid, or challenging them if they weren’t, regardless of how much sleep I had gotten.
Eliminating all of the other possible key factors leaves only one plausible conclusion: of the mental aptitudes associated with any form of intelligence, the enigmatic “board vision,” the ability to visualize how letters fit together and potentially interact with those on the board, was by far the largest contributor to the gap between my Scrabble Jekyll and Hyde phases. With ample rest and low-glycemic food, my board vision, not quite at the Nigel Richards level but still excellent, made me a highly dominant player, but it quickly abandoned me when the fog of fatigue obscured my mind’s eye.
In conclusion, I can tell you with some confidence that visuospatial ability is the key to Scrabble excellence, and likely the main factor separating players at the very top.
Invoking the Jabberwock, and why I don’t play Scrabble nowadays
English-language Scrabble is not the same game worldwide. The North American and global versions use different dictionaries, the global being considerably larger, and have crucial rule differences that often yield major effects on strategy.
If a player believes his opponent has played an invalid word, he has the option to challenge the play in any variant of Scrabble. The play remains on the board if valid and is removed if not, and the loser of the challenge suffers a penalty. The challenge option only exists for the most recent play, and must be taken before the player who played it draws replacement tiles. By convention, the “phony” word is marked with an asterisk on the player’s scoresheet and in subsequent analysis.
The difference, and it is a large one, comes in the nature and magnitude of the penalty. Under global rules, the loser of the challenge loses five points, but under North American rules, he loses his turn. The latter is much harsher, since the average play scores more than twenty points. This creates a more strategically interesting game, since a player must have much more confidence in a play’s invalidity to challenge it. It also allows for intentional bluffing, which can be very effective if there is a large disparity in word knowledge between the players.
The option to deliberately play fake words creates a fascinating problem, intractable to artificial intelligence and unique to North American Scrabble among games of strategy. In poker, we can apply basic game-theoretic concepts to compute optimal bluffing ratios according to the ratio of the bet size to the pot size. It is a matter of balancing risk and reward. In Scrabble, the reward desired by the word-bluffer is the additional score, or more accurately the increased probability of winning, beyond that provided by his best valid, certain-to-remain-on-the-board play. Positions ripe for linguistic innovation, then, are those with no really good legal options. But how can we even begin to estimate the risk?
A general means of quantifying plausibility of Scrabble words may well be beyond mortal reach.
I can tell you, using the same principles of game theory that work so well in poker, how often a phony needs to succeed to make it a better choice then the best valid play. I can’t tell you so easily how you might estimate the chances of a particular player challenging a particular word. How well do you know him? Speaking of optimal ratios here just doesn’t make sense. The nature of the problem is fundamentally different. A poker bluff isn’t something conjured up out of the player’s imagination; it’s an actual poker hand, chosen from a finite, easily definable range of hands. Eight high is a bluff, but it’s as valid a part of the poker “lexicon” as a flush. A word-bluff, however, is in some sense incommensurate with the set of valid words it is meant to infiltrate. Playing BIOPHONICS* in Scrabble is not like betting in poker with Eight high; it’s more like betting while holding a Pokemon card and a bus ticket. Linguistic innovation is potentially infinite, and even in written language limited (to an absurdly large number) only by the constraint of permuting a finite character set.
I’ll leave this topic with a closing thought. I explained earlier in this essay that Scrabble performance is not very dependent on either verbal or mathematical proficiency. Yet here I am describing an aspect of the game that, uniquely and delightfully, allows for tremendous verbal creativity within a mathematical framework. It has practically been eradicated from the game’s more widespread and prestigious global variant, while more and more North American players abandon their traditional game for that variant. With a larger, harder to assimilate lexicon, the global game should offer the player more, not less, incentive to try to expand the English language into the realm of the incalculable.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I don’t know what the point of this article is. The Unz Review readership needs some clear message from which they can derive emotional satisfaction.
I suggest that the author should append the following text to the end of the article:
I congratulate you on an interesting and well-written article. I don’t play scrabble, or at least I haven’t for decades, but I can see that it’s a game offering a lot of food for thought for game theory experts, and your overview is fascinating.
What you have described is memorization…the ability to gain and retain knowledge—a good thing for sure. Memorization is crucial in Scrabble, Wordsum, and spelling bees.
But an actual test of human intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly, to understand and analyze unfamiliar information to solve new problems, including solving puzzles, constructing strategies to deal with new problems, seeing patterns in statistical data, and engaging in speculative philosophical reasoning, to think logically. This is sometimes referred to as fluid intelligence.
And this is where blacks fail to match other races.
There’s only one sub-Saharan African who attained the title of chess Grandmaster.
He isn’t particularly good (peak FIDE rating: 2461); nor looks very Black either…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Solomon
The other – few – African GMs are from countries like Egypt…
German mnemonist Simon Reinhard is a Top 10 “memory athlete” in the whole World. But, at chess, which he also plays – he is merely an amateur-level player.
Sources:
https://iam-stats.org/rankings.php
https://ratings.fide.com/profile/16278445
Chess is not so much a memory game but a game where looking at possible future moves is advantageous.
It sounds like a very intellectually stimulating game. Chess must be a very mathematical game in contrast with Scrabble. And competitive crossword puzzle solving must be very much a test of verbal ability.
So the large penalty for losing a challenge in North American Scrabble means that you have to be more confident that a word is invalid. But doesn’t the larger penalty mean that bluffing with a fake word is more risky as well? If successful bluffing really is advantageous, then the game rewards dissemblers.
Curiously, in the above ranking: loads and loads of Mongolians!
Mongolians: according to Lynn’s data, they have an IQ comparable to the Vietnamese i.e. BEHIND the Chinese/Japanese/Koreans.
Meanwhile… the Jews: they’re 50% of Chess World Champions – but Jewish IQ’s advantage is mostly VERBAL, right?
Fundamentally the way to play chess at a high level is to memorize a bunch of positions and then memorize the correct counter-play. This is how grandmasters win 50 games or whatever at once; they’re not working out the moves, they’re remembering the moves they already played in that position and playing them again. It won last time, why not this time? Memorizing lists of fundamentally meaningless, unrelated things is a huge Jewish specialty.
Test: if I’m basically right, it means the way to beat a grandmaster is to produce a board position he hasn’t previously memorized. He’ll have to work it out on the fly, just like you do, and won’t know what kind of future board positions it’s likely to lead to. Evens the playing field.
Computers are especially good at this completely by accident.
By contrast, most grandmasters will try to manoeuvre the board into a familiar configuration in which they have an advantage. Even if they don’t do it on purpose, they will naturally gravitate toward paths they’ve already walked. Chess computers don’t remember past paths, and will end up diverging every time they make a minor error.
You too, huh?
Have you noticed that even “smart” fraction Twitter et all discussion is wholly restricted to V-IQ and S-IQ? E.g. word rotators and shapecels. Real intelligence, L-IQ, is wholly forgotten. Shut up and compute.
On one hand, tests with a low cap aren’t all that highly g-loaded. By contrast, the Scrabble visuospatial thing is a combinatoric explosion and thus extremely g-loaded. You can always search more of the space, and you can always use compression-algorithm-analogs to prune more efficiently. However, both operations are CPU-heavy, and you have to balance them against each other – which is another CPU-heavy compression-analog.
On the other hand, mental training is a lot more like a gym schedule than a reading schedule. Imagine the greatest weightlifter in the world, but he never goes to the gym. He has the best genetic muscles in the world, so he’ll be the strongest couch potato you ever met, but in absolute terms he’s plain weak. If we approximate using a usual Pareto ratio, it’s 80% training and 20% talent.
Loss of sleep affects your genetic cognitive component but not the training component. At the top level everyone maxes out training benefit, so talent matters enormously at the margin.
1. I don’t see why “long-term memory and recall speed, spatial awareness, and logic” should not be included under the rubric of “intelligence”. If psychometrists use the word for a proprietary concept, perhaps they should stop and invent a neologism instead to avoid confusion with the demotic connotation of the word.
2. The daily rhythm of cognitive capacity has been studied in detail for over a century. The ability to do calculations, among other things, oscillates with the body temperature and is maximal in the afternoon. Sleep is a confounder (yes, you are better at it after sleeping, but this is not your circadian rhythm).
3. Visuospatial intelligence is in fact one of the most important faculties in real-life scientific discovery. I recommend Jacques Monod’s comments about the crucial role in his work played by his being able to visualize protein structures and rotations in his mind’s eye.
Scrabble and Spelling bee are pointless activities that consume enormous energy and time, and they are of no use. Perhaps someone should come forward and continue the work of Bernard Russell and reform the English writing/reading system. It is simply amazing that even educated people cannot write a dictation or read a text without errors or without asking the spelling.
The Serbian language, for example, is phonetic and children as young as 3 can read simple texts without complicated words. A foreigner can learn to read and write Serbian in 5 minutes without making a mistake because each voice is marked with one letter and not like in English or German where sometimes you have to write 4 letters for one voice – for example TSCH-aikovsky instead of Ч-ајковски. Each letter is always pronounced the same, regardless of whether it is at the beginning, end or middle of a word.
Thank you for the fascinating article.
I study my own field of what I call cogno-linguistics and how humans perceive reality largely through the language and syntax that they use to describe it. One of my most valuable tools is to focus on anomalies.
Please don’t be offended, but one such anomaly (and the only one that I can see easily) in your otherwise outstanding article is where you wrote:
“I can arise early and due routine physical or mental work well enough,”
The problem is that the “o” and the “u” are not close enough together on the keyboard for the substitution of “due” for “do” to be a conventional typo or caused by an auto-complete subroutine, and the phonetic similarity of the two words leads me to suspect that it was indeed what baseball players would call an unforced error.
Any ideas on how it occurred?
Frankly, I doubt if ‘being very smart’ has anything to do with “excellence” at Scrabble. Whatever skill set is needed for being a champion is either present in an individual or it isn’t. Desiring to even engage in the game is necessary as well. I haven’t played since I was a teenager because I found it to be rather boring, and on that account I made no effort to continue.
People have wildy varying interests, and as a race, we humans have individuals who can easily do things which seem impossible to others without their inborn abilities.
Back when computer games were first produced, I found most to be quite uninteresting for one reason or other. The few exceptions joined the “blah” bunch when I mastered them. Finally winning at the Atari “Star Raiders” most difficult setting left only one reason to continue – continuing as Star Commander Class 1 while playing without shields. After managing that, it was time to set the game aside.
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/326548-star-raiders-star-commander-class-1-atari-130xe/
Small triumphs like that can be satisfying. Another trivial example:
Why it’s Impossible to Catch a Dollar Bill with Your Fingers
There is actually a mathematical reason why you can’t catch a falling bill between your fingers, check it out and trick your friends.
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/impossible-catch-dollar-bill-fingers
Once during a break in a college class I demonstrated this parlor trick to classmates. Sure enough, the dollar bill slipped right past their late-clutching fingers. Next I showed how I could catch it every single time when they were the ones dropping it. Finally, I explained how I could manage this and they couldn’t. (hint – this was a summer school class, and everyone was wearing short sleeves)
We tend to do (and think about) things we like, and that can mean we get to be pretty good at those things. One ongoing thought experiment of mine is to try to puzzle out the reason humans made the same Acheulean “hand ax” design for way over a million years.
(I’m making some progress here…:))
Another is wondering how I can ever prove or disprove what I’m going to call Zachary’s Conjecture. (bear with me!) Prime Numbers come as singles, pairs, and so on. Minimal spacing for the pairs of primes is “2” – example 3 and 5. But the closest spacing for the “Pairs” is “6” (2 x 3) – example 11-13 and 17-19. Call that grouping a Prime Decade. The minimum spacing for a pair of Prime Decades is “30” – 6 x 5. (1006301 and 1006331)
If this continues, somewhere down the number line a Quadruplet of Prime Decades ought to have a separation of 210 (30 x 7)
After that would there be another larger grouping with a minimum spacing of 2310 (210 x 11)?
Will the trend continue? I don’t have the computer skills to find out!
I think in many fields the correlation between intelligence (as per example measured by IQ tests) and success is far from perfect. In many cases the important part is that there is a certain minimum intelligence to enter the field and a given level in that field. Then other factors are also important. E.g. academic success: you can certainly find some level of intelligence which is required to come into the position to theoretically win a nobel prize. But among those who have reached that level the nobel prize doesn’t necessarily go to the most intelligent person.What differentiates them might be “grit”, hard work, luck, or anything else.
As far as I understand the article scrabble is very similar (“We tend to be bright, sometimes even brilliant. But intelligence, strictly speaking, is not what separates Nigel Richards from us.”)
So the argument that high success in scrabble contradicts the hypothesis of genetical reasons for racial IQ differences still holds true in my opinion.
This guy looks pretty black.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontus_Carlsson
Mr Chisala, ( if you have read this article) what do you think? Looking forward to articles from you concerning this and related topics.
Is it known whether Nigerian Igbos score higher on IQ (or related) tests than other West African groups?
Agree. Scrabble is a game. Many fake words in the list now. The author gives a glimpse of his true language acuity with the error commonly made by Yanks seen in the quote below.
Except in the case of Einstein and all the other Jewish scientists that have excelled.
Yes, they are pretty much entertainment, similar to athletes and thespianism.
After a little thought, if competitive Scrabble now allows French words that are not used in English, and Hebrew words that aren’t written in the Roman alphabet and aren’t used in English, they may as well throw everything in.
The three systems of romanisation for Japanese, two main ones for Mandarin, those for other Chinese dialects, all words from every other language that is written in romanised script, and every language that has some form of romanisation.
Korean would have some high-score combos, Xhosa even more so. Slavonic languages, too.
Really, it’s the only logical conclusion.
Word-salad Scrabble!
But that argument presupposes that high success in Scrabble indicates high IQ. I disagree…memory is the reason for success in Scrabble.
I’d call this a thought pattern-mistake; thinking along the lines of, “I can duly engage in physical or mental work well enough”, then changing the pattern of the discussion but not updating the wording.
Common for those who tend to sort through many options before making a decision; stereotype of the scatterbrained nature of the mad scientist.
He’s Magnus’ Brother.
This is a feminine way of thinking, and perhaps a bit satirical.
As a male, I don’t need emotional satisfaction, so much as I need truth and facts.
Einstein was a plagiarist.
It would seem that an important common thread among many of the men’s chess champions is Eastern Slavic (particularly Russian) genes and culture:
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Chess_Champions
Also, has a Jew won the men’s world chess championship in the past 24 years? Doesn’t look like it.
As for women’s chess champions, where are the Jews?
Lastly, we might reasonably expect the Chinese to soon dominate this field, particularly if the PRC makes a concerted effort to do so. The new men’s chess champion is a Chinese guy from the PRC, right?
True. He is Afro-Colombian by birth – adopted by Swedish parents. So, being “Afro-Colombian” makes him likely tri-racial.
Certainly, there are Jews formidable at Maths too.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
“But Ganesh Asirvatham’s name is Hindu and his appearance Dravidian, so presumably he is much closer genetically to the Anglo-Saxon Richards than to the Igbo and Yoruba champions of Nigeria.”
I don’t recommend this experiment but one way to find out about his genetic make up is to mate him with a white woman and if the byproduct looks like Barack Hussain Obama then he is a negroesque Igbo but most likely the child would look like Carmen Diaz.
P. S. I investigated his name and found that he is named after the potbellied, elephant trunk Hindu god Ganesha and his last name means blessing … it explains why he likes scrabble.
Strip Scrabble is the best. Why is this a pressing subject matter at present? Hopefully they’ll let us play scrabble in the new camps.
My late mother and her sister were vicious scrabble players. My wife has also been pretty dedicated to the game. I have been excessively educated in verbal disciplines and have spent a career making combinations of words into arguments and explanations. I’ve also been generally fluent in two Romance languages when I have the opportunity for immersion.
I considered these scrabble contests to be frivolous matters and, one evening, decided to sit in on a game with my Mother and Aunt. I figured I’d blow them away with my verbal skills. Instead, it took me fifteen minutes to call bs on the whole thing and angrily concede.
Thank you for explaining to me my misconceptions.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t recall ever seeing or reading that particular typo before, and unlike you, English is my first language.
Do and due are homophones, or homonyms – words that sound alike but have different meanings. The question raised in comment 13 by Timothy Madden is an interesting one.
That type of “unforced error” is called a malapropism, or dogberry.
Capital idea Bro!
As a matter of fact, why don’t we mate every subconscious, with a woman from Norway, Sweden Iceland or Denmark to further the experiment, until the supply runs out!
IQ of a particular group is just an averaged score. We can’t use the top 15% to justify the overall IQ score. Just like Whites using average White IQ to justify their intelligence over Blacks. About 40% of Whites have the same or lower IQ as Black average IQ.
In the last two Chess World Championship matches, the Challenger was a Jew. Ian Nepomniachtchi. He lost to Magnus Carlsen in 2021, and lost to Chinese Ding Liren in 2023.
Ah, in 2012, the Challenger was Jewish Boris Gelfand – he lost to Indian genius Vishy Anand.
Anyway, currently Jews are STILL overrepresented in the chess élite: Svidler (retired?), Dubov, Radjabov, Aronian and the aforementioned Nepomniachtchi…
.
.
.
The greatest, by far, female chess-player ever is Jewess Judit Polgár.
This Scrabble saga is bizarre. Both the Chisala articles and this one (which I haven’t fully read) make no sense to me. So, some Black people are good at Scrabble. So what? Should we organize some Scrabble competitions in the ghetto, so perhaps they’ll kill each other less? Or is the idea to use Scrabble instead of the SAT for Harvard admissions?
I like Scrabble. But all these pointless articles about IQ are stupid, on par on Steve’s articles about golf. Surely there are more pressing matters these days?
True, but the grandmasters memorise huge numbers of plays. Once read about how many Fisher and Spassky read. Thousands, the main points are openings, end-games, and particular arrangements, so that by memorisation, they play the advantageous of the former, and try to set up or block the latter.
Many variants of chess exist, I know and have played Japanese shougi and similarly named Chinese chess, but very different games and very different from each other.
A bookshop near Tokyo Station had an exhibition of different types of chess, and explaining the play, so many! Everywhere in N.H. from Spain to Japan, with eight or more slightly or somewhat different games in between.
Fisher decided that chess of the international style was too predictable, so advocated Fisher Random Chess, with the positions of the pieces behind the pawns randomised.
Or possibly the text was produced with voice to text software, and was not subsquently grammar- or spell-checked?
The author of this article is ample demonstration.
LOL, one is Norwegian, Swedish parents who adopted the other.
You piece of shit troll.
‘Do’, not ‘due’ is correct, not my first language, but in such a case, error is easy to see.
Yada, yada, yada, this is the favorite, erroneous claim that those who hate all Jews love to promulgate.
Assuming there’s about 1 S.D, between them, isn’t 15% nearer the mark?
I get it! You got to be dumb to play scrabble!
Gee, you guys is schmart.
I was hoping there would be a discussion of black scrabble names but no luck. Darn!
It would be helpful if you understood normal distribution and the bell curve. When a populations (let’s call them B) average is pushed to the left, on the X axis in relation to the average of another population (let’s call them W), the values under the curve at the extreme right on W’s axis will far exceed those of B’s. So for this subject, it means that Whites’ high IQ values will significantly exceed those of Blacks.
Chess puzzles online are randomized. Fischer also bravely pointed out that the Holocaust was baloney.
Jews exaggerate their suffering and are good at writing fiction. Thus, detention became genocide. Traditional Judaism holds that Jewish lives are vastly more valuable than Gentile lives. So, 600,000 Jewish deaths became 6,000,000 when telling the story to the general public.
Magnus Carlsen is another great chess player. He played fantasy football and did very well. Similar to fantasy is gambling.
Below are my picks for the upcoming football season. I can’t actually gamble because it’s not legal in my state (FL).
Most Valuable Player: Patrick Mahomes
Offensive Player of the Year: Ja’Marr Chase
Defensive Player of the Year: Micah Parsons
Coach of the Year: Sean Payton
American Football Conference Division Champions: New York Jets, Jacksonville Jaguars, Kansas City Chiefs, Cincinnati Bengals
National Football Conference Division Champions: San Francisco 49ers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Philadelphia Eagles, Green Bay Packers
“About 40% of Whites have the same or lower IQ as Black average IQ.”
Not according to my calculator. Whites’ bell curve has an average IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15. The proportion of this bell curve below the Black average 85 is
normalcdf(-9E99,85,100,15) = 15.87%, not 40%.
Bingo. That system would be a much better gauge of intelligence, ie, the ability to think on your feet to solve a problem intelligently.
“Human intelligence [is defined as] mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.”
High level chess competitions nowadays seem to almost always end in a draw, which doesn’t prove a whole hell of a lot except a high ability to memorize end games. (There are chess players in my family.)
Well jews love to promulgate this idea of Eisnstein, a dirty man, As a lazy patentents lerke, he is a lazy patents, by his own admission, and that time a talelenteted Serbian phsycist wife, many antecendts on the path, but when Al published from the Berne patent office, not one reference, not one acknelowedgment.
General rel much the same.
Einsteen, das klaun. But not funny,
Ah, so you’ve never heard of chunking?
And it’s completely useless if it’s not being used as an aide to logical intelligence.
Derb would find your comment interesting.
lol roguelike chess
The pot calls the teacup black.
Your entirely unfounded claim about “the error commonly made by Yanks” makes you the troll, here, Che Guava.
And despite your attempts to thump your chest about your 2nd grade English spelling prowess, the typo had already been noted in comment 13.
That’s odd. I don’t recall ever having made that mistake before.
I always turn off auto-complete, auto-spellcheck, and similar things. My interests and language are abstruse enough that failure to do so would result in errors far more egregious than this one.
It must’ve come from my own mind, but I couldn’t tell you how.
Nice post, true on Fischer, people really should be collected his radio broadcast, I would guess that the one where he expl odes with emotion over 9/11 news ‘This is wonderful news!’ [in a very emotional voice]
Your NFL tips also appreciated but I don’t watch it, I’ll copy the list and try to find out how to bet on those things.
Anyway.
Thanks
Oh, riilly(-.-)Zzz・・・・
Scrabble is OK, but try stepping up to the world of Countdown….
Video Link
Chess, too, is not an intelligence test. Yes, intelligence selects masters from the top 2% IQ, but the sweet spot has been found to be (only) 135. Not Albert levels. That means other factors are involved that very high IQ often cripples, such as nerve and strategy while under combat.
You may be a player, and a good one, but not a gambler. No gambler ever let illegality prevent a bet anywhere ever.
STAINER
Not all nouns can get an “s” or be pluralized at all. Quail, sheep, fish (yes, “fishes”), Iroquois, fugu, negress, lioness, penis, deer, labia…
“Physical units having to do with electricity can be prefixed with an AB-.”
Like “AB-Bullshit”?
“A player lucky enough to cover two triple-word squares in a single turn will need to be able to multiply by 9. ”
The players are not responsible for scorekeeping.
“I can arise early and due routine physical or mental work well enough” Yes, dear, of course you can.
The author sounds like a huge fag who wants to brag about how smart he is.
#12 @Odyssey: Serbia, Serbian, and Serbians suck major ass and Mrs. Ass is quite distressed.
It happens to me all the time, and I scored 2330 on my GRE in 2000.
Out of buttons, but Thanks.
The back and forth over ‘due’ had me more confused than its actual appearance until I spotted the comment that it sounds the same as ‘do’. Ah yes the American very hard ‘d’ before a vowel. Sometimes Canadian pronunciation is softer, I wonder if they too pronounce ‘due’ as ‘doo’.
Yup.
Autistic savants can do some pretty fantastic things:
Calender calculations over 80,000 years
Almost instantly count the matches dumped out of a matchbox
Calculate lengthy prime numbers
Remember day’s events throughout their lives.
All of which doesn’t relate much to abstract logical thinking – the important intelligence.
“What you have described is memorization”
The description of alphagrams didn’t sound to me like memorization per se.
Possibly I missed the point of these, but to me it sounded like a more sophisticated version of how I play Scrabble. When I get my rack I immediately start to look not for words to make of the letters in front of me —in my head—but combinations of letters that I know occur in English. That means, consonant clusters with vowels, or combinations with -gh endings, etc.
Quite quickly as I rearrange the tiles in different typical combinations and also look at the board, whole words start to pop out that I wouldn’t otherwise have “seen” or even thought of.
This seems to me to be more pattern creation and recognition than memorization.
But perhaps this system of mine for “excavating” words from a group of letters unrelated to what the author describes.
My first hypothesis is mainly that it’s boring. Chess is a repetitive game. 135 is midwit, by the way. Grug brain is below 115 at best.
If you’re genuinely intelligent the solution to every chess problem is: forfeit the game and go do something else. Calculating future chess positions is grunt work, which is why computers are so good at it. No one claims doing multiplication drills is a fun and deep game.
It’s fun to play Scrabble. It is a social activity.
Except it is not much fun to play with very competitive people.
They love to block others from making any words and more or less ruin the game.
All they can think of is the number of points they got.
It is possible to enjoy winning and making good plays without ruining the game by having too great a need to win.
Regarding the inconsistencies of English spelling, over the years English speakers have more or less chosen to retain the etymological history in their spellings, instead of “modernizing” and “reforming.” The same is true of many of the choices made in French—spellings reflect the history of the word, not purely the phonetics.
Yep, Milena Maric did all maths for him.
The most common cause is having non-low-A and reading a bunch of text posted online. End up copying their bad habits even if you know better. Monkey see, monkey due.
There hasn’t been any real progress in physics for at least a quarter-century, and the proximate cause is ‘shut up and compute.’
Indeed it’s already showing signs of regression, having lost things it knew before science was nationalized in 1945.
I noticed that error.
I assumed it arose in the same fashion that I quite often make such errors: a kind of short circuit, when I am writing fast, to a homophone of the word I want—e.g., “their” for “there.”
Sometimes this even occurs when I am writing by hand.
I usually catch it immediately, but occasionally I don’t.
Are you a little nervous, Anonymous? I have noticed that some Serbophobes are very frustrated when they cannot find a single material error in my comments. Yes, you are right, the Serbian alphabet is the simplest in the world and it originates from the oldest script in the world in Vinca, the cradle of European civilization, culture, language (and alphabet) and is at least 7000 years old. Even a moron like you could learn to read and write without mistakes in three minutes and become a top expert in Serbian Scrabble (or crosswords).
Thanks, you may give us some history of any of – ghost, land, cat, pyre, medicine, vampire, etc. What is the connection between English and Sanskrit (considering the time distance of 3000 years, plus few thousands of kilometers). An English speaker is not able to write any non-English name without spelling and, the other speaker is not able to read his writing.
You can be a GrandMaster in chess regardless of your language. However you can only be good in Scrabble in your own language. So if you only speak English you are the Wizard but playing in Spanish you are an asshole. Scrabble therefore is a measure of word knowledge and spelling and not IQ.
As for Blacks, here are some tales from the Crypt in the West Indies. ENJOY !!
Two Black Men decide to play a gambling game called “Ling” a perversion of the word “Line”. You draw a straight chalk line on a concrete slab and each player throws, say a Quarter. The man who is closest to the line wins. In this case the concrete slab had a small bump and the line was somewhat crooked at that point. Hence, one Quarter was close to the bend in the line versus the other player’s money which was closest to the straight section. An argument erupted and escalated. When one player bent over to closely examine the situation, the other guy pulled out a Taurus 32 and shot him in the back of his head. For bubble gum change he got a 15 year stretch for Manslaughter!
Ivelaw is a labourer in the market. He moves 100 pound bags of produce for an East Indian vendor and earns about $200 US a month equivalent. Ivelaw lives with Clarissa, an over weight 22 year old black mother of 5 kids all from different men. Its the best he can do ! However, on pay day, Ivelaw hangs with his Bros at the Chinese rum shop spending a whole months wages on high wine. To put food on the table, Clarissa takes a job as a security guard at the nearby elementary school. Sadly, after Ivelaw boozes his dough he demands Clarissa’s. When she refuses he beats the shit out of her the last thrashing being with a piece of wood ! She moves out but Ivelaw continues to hound her.
Hearing she is living with yet another black man, Ivelaw decides to take care of business. He breaks into the man;s shack, quietly enters the bedroom and catches his love being violently boned. In this country even consensual sex is ultra violent and not much different from rape. Ivelaw runs to the kitchen and returns with a big knife. By this time the new stud on the case has withdrawn his tool and withdrawn another tool, a 22 Calibre pistol from under the pillow. The first shot goes through Ivelaws face and lodges in his head and he reels. The second slams into his throat and ends up behind his left ear. Realizing he has brought a knife to a gunfight and there is no one more pissed than a man disturbed from bustin his nut, he turns to flee. and takes two more rounds to the back.
Somehow or the other, with four slugs in his body, two of which are in his head he flees to the Police outpost. There though, the Police who are well acquainted with Ivelaw are in turn pissed at being disturbed. from their snooze They fuck him up with blows before dragging him to the hospital. In the meantime, black stud #2 has fled into the slum area but Clarissa is arrested. At the Police outpost she is told she is a murder accomplice but there is a way to mitigate the charges. Female jails in the Islands are unpleasant places. Clarissa wants this mess to go away and so …..The three black Police boys take turns fucking her.
Ivelaw survives but somehow he walks crooked, is deaf in one ear and slurs his words. Before all this drama Ivelaw was border line dumb but after recovery and return to work, his Babu employer classifies Ivelaw as a mumbling dribbling idiot………….and fires him. No more pussy for Ivelaw, no money for rum sprees. His drinking Bruddas have abandoned him, they dont want any freeloaders. The ingrates ! Ivelaw roams the streets of the capital looking for food scraps. Some days even banana and plantain skins are on the menu.His shirt has long disintegrated and his pants are so ripped up his dick hung out. The black female sidewalk vendors got angry at Ivelaw as his presence is offensive to customers and thus bad for business. Since the Police will do nothing, the women and their “husbands ?” beat him up and throw him in the drain where he drowns in 5 inches of muck. A real sad tale about a promising young man.
Two black school boys play a game of Scrabble. Its a close game. One player gets the following letters. A, G, G, I, N, Z, Q. If only he could get on a double/ triple score block his opponent will lose big time. What word though ? Hmmm, Ah, Damn, Oh yes, YES : NIGGAZ. An argument starts because ” Nigga there ain’t no fuckin word like NIGGAZ in any dictionary. Is you dumb ?”
The confrontation escalates. The air reeks of profanity. They call each other’s mothers whores. One kid pulls a Jukka from his waist (any sharp pointed weapon resembling an ice pick. From the African Fula Tribe word JUK meaning a spur or to poke) and rams it onto the other kids neck. If Niggaz was a word it was game over. The game ended anyway with one player squirting blood from his neck. On this Island there aint no ambulance service and since no other public spirited black citizen want blood pouring all over their Toyotas the kid bled out with the Scrabble Board and letters thrown on top of him as a final insult. All the mini Dindoos fled leaving their school mate alone, clutching his throat and jerking his final moments on the ground in a pool of blood. The world would be deprived of a first rate Spelling Bee contestant.
Yeah White Brothers ! Blacks have a high IQ wherever they live !
Indeed, Einstein was not proficient in math to the degree required for his theory, but it was Marcel Grossmann, also a Jew, who helped Einstein with complex math. But the point is it was Einstein that produced the concept of relativity through his imagination, ability to reason abstractly, and to develop and understand new physical concepts.
The purpose of your comment was to belittle the accomplishments of a brilliant Jew due to obsessive hatred of all Jews.
His comment was :
The most efficient way for a human to absorb the huge number of alphagrams needed for competitive Scrabble is to study flashcards.
Flashcards are a tool for memorization.
Wrong. I don’t write about Jews at all, although I sometimes mention the unprecedented anti-Serb media campaign of their American media during the events in Yugoslavia in the 90s, the decisive role of their politicians in the bombing of Serbia, as well as their exclusivity as victims of genocide and the minimization of Serbian victims in WW2, whose number seems to have been bigger than theirs.
here’s some scrabble we all can grok:
http://seductivejewess7.com/type-ii-l225-sheila-sarah-luftschein/
But it sounds to me as though what is on the flash cards is patterns, not words to memorize.
One could say that I had “memorized” common letter combinations in English.
Long ago I guess I did.
However, I must admit that I couldn’t actually follow the alphagram argument.
How alphagrams relate to actually playable words.
Perhaps the author will clarify whether his success in Scrabble rests on memorization or on pattern recognition.
Not sure why you bring up Sanskrit.
I was alluding to, for instance, the appropriation by English of many French, Latin, and Greek words, or the retention of archaic spelling based on no-longer-current pronunciation, etc.
The rest of of your post is more or less incomprehensible
No worries, the words I mentioned have a Serbian origin. Don’t worry about Sanskrit, it would be too much for this scrabble story.
“I can arise early and due routine physical or mental work well enough, but with my mind foggy I don’t have the mental energy to hold a train of thought long enough for real problem-solving.”
You should have a sleep study done. You could be in for a shock.
Shortly after Max Planck developed his theories, he went on tour in Europe explaining it to audiences of physicists. One day his chauffeur said to him, Dr. Planck, you are exhausted, and by now I know the answers to all of these repetitive questions, so why don’t you just put on my chauffeurs cap, and sit in the audience, and take a rest, and I will conduct the lecture as a physicist expert on the theories, filling-in for you.
Well, the imposture worked fine until a physicist in the audience asked a novel, creative, extremely complicated question. The flummoxed lecturer responded: That question is so insultingly stupid and it’s so easy that I will just have my chauffeur handle it; he is sitting there in the audience wearing the cap, and I will tell him to answer it.
And that’s the anecdote that gave rise to the phrase “chauffeur knowledge.”
Only 1 half Jewish (Kasparov) world chess champion in last 50 years. Others are Ding Liren, Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Vladimir Kramnik and Anatoly Karpov.
Only 1 Jewish person in current World Top 30.
“an old Jewish joke”
Pathetic
It matters not flashcards are for memorization. You seem to have a hard time understanding what memorization is.
Well, your comment sure pushes the narrative used by those that hate all Jews that Einstein plagiarized the ideas for his theories; he was poor at math and other untrue opinions.
I‘m a fast typist, but of course my fingers cannot keep up with my thoughts as I compose on the fly, and my fingers dance over the keys.
I notice or detect my typing errors when I’ve already typed several characters or even words past them, and typically, I simply mash on the backspace key until I backtrack past the error(s) before continuing.
When I’m cruising along without making typos, I know I have some kind of mental multitasking going on in the back of my mind, so to say, and merely thinking of another word, or having it cross my mind – even the wrong word – can result in my fingers typing it.
We could talk about the right and left hands and fingers being wired to the opposite sides of the brain, and how language is usually deemed to be a left-hemisphere activity, so it seems obvious that signals are flying back and forth across the corpus callosum while we type.
Finally, I see that author Joe Dackman had used the word due twice before he mistyped it in place of do.
Do new habits die hard, or is it parapraxis, or even a phonologically based lexical selection error?
I dunno, but your typos may vary. Mine sure do.
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2380/when-you-think-one-word-but-write-another-similar-sounding-word
Hi: Thank you for that as it is quite helpful.
I find that when I proofread my own writing I do not see what is on the page or screen but rather what my brain thinks is on the page. About thirty years ago I wrote a hundred-plus page analysis of an important court decision and had read it over at least 20 times over a two month period, at which point I would have bet good money that there could not be more than three to four typos in the whole thing (I have a background in statistical analysis).
I was also about to take a copy of it with me on a month long trip to the other side of the world for a family wedding when my business partner said to the effect “Leave the damn thing alone and get back to it fresh when you get back”.
When I got back and read it again, I found perhaps 3 to 4 typos on almost every page! Clearly I had not been reading precisely what was in fact on the page.
Ever since I have been studying the phenomenon and mentally categorizing the most common types of such errors, starting with double “and” as in “and and” where my brain was not registering the second “and”.
But “due” for “do” is a true anomaly as it does not fit the pattern of anything I have encountered, and seems to be more phonetic-based than visual. When pronounced properly they are very similar but not exact.
Thank you again regardless for the article as there is much fascinating and useful information in there for me even though I am not a Scrabble player.
Tim.
I didn’t talk about Einstein, I just mentioned that his Serbian wife did the mathematical part of the theory. I will not go into whether he was a Jew and/or a plagiarist, but the fact is that as a thinker he was far below Nikola Tesla, who changed the course of world history and whose ideas are not yet fully understood.
I stated several important facts when the American deep state worked against Serbian interests and is still working, trying to justify its own aggression by pressuring Serbia to give up Kosovo. Also, it sees Serbs as Russian allies, so it puts more pressure on Serbia, encouraging her puppet vassals in the region to provoke Serbia and start a war against them.
So, the topic you mentioned is secondary for me. I am trying to uncover historical falsifications directed against the Serbs (and against the humanity) and the reasons why attempts have been made to destroy the Serbs for almost 2000 years. We have a strange anti-Serb coalition that works in sync – the Vatican, Communists, Zionists, Islamic fundamentalists, US deep state imperialists but the biggest enemy is human stupidity that repeats the propaganda of the previous coalition and whose Serbophobia is often present on this blog.
Anti-Semitism, real and perceived, is persecuted in all countries and at the end of the day, the US military machine is in the service of global Zionism. On the other hand, Serbophobia is desirable and openly encouraged. Serbs must defend themselves alone from that coalition.
Yes, this is the exact reason most professional writers give their work to a professional proofreader (or at least, to someone else) to proofread before the work is submitted for publication. In many newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and publication departments, the copy also has to pass across the editor’s desk before he will release it, or sign off on it, for publication.
Dew, do and due are homophones. Virtually all native English speakers from the United States pronounce these three words exactly the same.
I’ll concede that my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992 gives dyo̅o̅ as a secondary pronunciation of dew and due after do̅o̅, but in my fairly long life, I’ve never heard a native English speaker pronounce either dew of due that way. Never, and I was in the U.S. Air Force, and served with guys from all over the country, and have traveled extensively since then.
I suggest that (mis)pronouncing due or dew as dyo̅o̅ qualifies as a hyperurbanism:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperurbanism
But this quibble about pronunciation is leading us off into the weeds, and likely had nothing to do with author Joe Dackman’s typo.
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/typo
Not quite, it’s not comparable. I’ve wasted and enjoyed too many hours playing Hack, Nethack, Rogue and a couple of ports, reach the twenty-somethingth dungeon near thirtieth, but too many monsters appear.
Have tried not attacking anything unless needed, and just collecting things, but that doesn’t work either. Limit on things to carry.
Ain’t like any kind of chess, s’pose that D’n’D nuts (had friends of the type) may have a better idea of the principles, but I’ve only ever failed near the exit.
So, the winning strategy must be to have as many invisibility potions and kill everything spells as possible, and use them just before escape. Still, half tried that, too, didn’t work.
But that is wrong, Marcel Grossmann helped Einstein with the esoteric part of math.
Milena Maric was brilliant, but the math assistance came from Grossmann.
That is demonstrably not true; Einstein changed the course of world history much more than Tesla.
There is no doubt that Tesla was a genius, but the fact that his ideas still need to be fully understood may mean they are incorrect.
She just doesn’t know what to due with him.
Give her her do.
Our taxes are do.
We’ll due something some time soon.
We don’t have a clue what to due.
I just don’t know what to due with myself.
Doggie due.
Etc.
I due apoloise for my insulting post, you are generally a commenter I like, and of course, as when I’m tired and drunk, my English breaks, usually avoid, but didn’t this time. Yanks may have many retarted pronunciations, I give eight examples above, that does not excuse pretending that the words are the same, as you did.
Yes, I know the meaning of ‘homophone’, but you displayed that you don’t know the meaning of ‘homonym’.
No, I’m sorry to say you still don’t know what you’re talking about. The examples you give are misspellings or typos but not mispronunciations.
In my grammar school education, homonym was the term used for words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings. We also studied synonyms and antonyms at that level.
Homophone is a synonym for homonym, and is a more recent addition to my vocabulary.
Homographs are sometimes incorrectly grouped with homonyms, but they are an entirely different kettle of fish that cannot lead to misspelling or typos because homographs are spelled exactly the same, but have different meaning.
The different meanings of homographs are usually clear, or can be inferred from reading context.
Just as it’s wise to have someone proof copy before it is submitted for publication, so too it is wise to avoid commenting when sloshed, which is a problem I don’t have simply because I no longer drink.
Thanks for that as it is quite helpful.
After reading your comment I have concluded that you are probably correct about hyperurbanisms. Over the past decade I have made eight trips between Vancouver Island where I live and south-east Africa where I am now, and I have probably been picking up different pronunciations of words that are properly phonetically identical.
For my own part I tend to pronounce “dew” and “do” the same, but “due” with a slight “g” sound at the beginning.
I also found that after reading the same essay multiple times that my head would develop a kind of bobbing motion that may be related to my ever increasing inability to see the actual words on the page with each pass as it were.
Then some time later I was watching a segment of a 60 Minutes-like program with a segment on some mullahs in the Middle East teaching the Koran to a group of seven-or-eight year-olds who were following along with their own copies, and I noticed that their little heads were bobbing along with the same cadence that I had experienced. It occurred to me that they were likely not seeing the words as written but rather what the mullahs were telling them that they were reading. Very profound potential consequences I think.
Also, with respect to the term “typo”, I think that you are correct in its technical meaning. But more than that I find that I rarely make such errors with my handwriting. I think it probably has something to do with the slower speed or words written per minute.
Finally, I absolutely agree with the necessity of proofreaders. Unfortunately, based on a broad sampling of what is presented on the internet these days, they seem to be an ever more vanishing species!
Thanks again, and much appreciated. Tim.
Ascending in Nethack reliably is possible – maybe it’s even possible to play well enough to guarantee it.
It’s like chess. It’s also completely unlike chess, since instead of memorizing a bunch of variations on the same theme, it’s memorizing an even larger amount of distinct and unrelated facts. E.g, you have to remember to kick every rock before you pick it up.
How many? Nethack is a bit like chess with 20,000 pieces. You win once you remember what they all do and what other piece to play them on.
There’s a guide. It takes an hour and a half just to read it. https://alt.org/nethack/mirror/homepage.mac.com/mhjohnson/mag-r342.html
There’s background you might also need to read.
Never mind just reading it, think about understanding and remembering to use all the things it says.
(I haven’t tried the guide myself, so it might, further, be missing some stuff. Kicking every rock sounds tedious as hell to me, let alone the rest of the rules, which means I have no desire to play Nethack well. Or even well enough to not die in minutes.)
Come to think there’s a big similarity with I Wanna Be The Guy. An intermediate-skill game goes like this: you play for a while. Then you run into something you haven’t seen before. Then it kills you, because not already exactly knowing its nature is extremely deadly. Then you get to re-play the bits that already don’t kill you.
I’ve heard it, albeit only satirically. It’s an upper-crust kind of accent, and of course America lacks an upper crust.
Since I’ve only heard it third-hand, by someone making fun of the kind of person who says it that way, I don’t know if it’s actually upper class or if it’s about middle-class poseurs.
E.g. pronouncing hwat, hwite, or hwale is a real thing, but it’s about being snooty, not about genuinely being an aristocrat. Saying due “properly” may have been the same sort of thing.
Homophone and homonym are not synonymous, and for all but a minority of US English speakers, the examples I gave are all homophones only in the very limited subset of some forms of U.S. English, but not one of my eight examples of bad usage is a homonym, and to most, not a homophone, either.
Homonyms, jig as a dance and jig as a mechanical or structural support device are homonyms.
Mr. Dackman sure deserved my mocking his use of ‘due’ where it should have been ‘do’. Surprising thing is that you decided to try to jump on me despite my having been correct.
What you’re describing is basically the “anagramming” I described in the article. There are certainly worse approaches to Scrabble, but the flaw here is that you’ll spend far too much time trying to find plays, and not nearly enough time (assuming timed tournament conditions) determining the best play.
The memorization process I described entails alphabetizing the tiles on one’s rack during the game, just as they would appear on the flashcard. After enough study, recognition of any valid words becomes instantaneous, or nearly so. No time is wasted shuffling tiles because the player has trained himself to associate the alphagram, in standard form, with the words.
“Dew, do and due are homophones. Virtually all native English speakers from the United States pronounce these three words exactly the same. ”
Wrong.
” in my fairly long life, I’ve never heard a native English speaker pronounce either dew of due that way. ”
Idiocy.
Possibly as a non-native speaker you didn’t pick up the difference.
Jackman’s error was not a type.
Sparkon, you are a pompous idiot with a tin ear.
You too don’t know what you’re talking about.
I’ve already stated earlier in this thread that English is my first language. So much for your reading comprehension, but nice work with the name-calling.
My father taught English at a Cal state university for over 30 years, where I also attended grad school in English.
I am a native-born American, educated in my youth by Dominicans and Jesuits in Roman Catholic parochial schools in the Midwest, where I commonly scored at or near the top among my peers in all standard tests; highest IQ in my class; selected for Great Books as an 8th grader; recipient of certificate for high academic achievement on the 1962 NEDT for scoring in the 98th percentile on nationally-administered Scientific Reading Comprehension tests.
I can tell you the Air Force Security Service did not select anyone with a tin ear for Intensive Russian training, which I completed, while 1/3 of my class washed out.
I would add few people with tin ears manage at all with Japanese, but I was complemented on my Japanese accent by a number of Japanese during the several years I lived in Japan while in the service, during which time I completed the entire University of Maryland extension set of courses in Japanese. Later, my senior-year Japanese instructor referred to me in class as “the sage,” and had other students direct their questions to me when stumped.
Of course that was long ago, and I tossed my Japanese books aside with the advent of Google Translate, which should make every linguist giddy, but I certainly would not go on a Japanese language blog, and try to lecture the native Japanese speakers about the finer points of their language.
I’ll wrap this up by noting that the Japanese are known for their hilarious English translations, which commonly mix-up R and L. In Misawa long ago, one of the electronic stores had a big sign on its back wall:
https://www.pinterest.com/jparbon/funny-japanese-signs/
I don’t recall a ‘kick the rock’ keystroke, nor ‘striking rocks’ having any effect.
Really, if wanting to play video games again, should return to the many I bought and enjoyed but haven’t finished. Finished many, possibly a giant waste of time, but also fun at the time, and to some extent, brain training.
Really, you just can’t stop the flow of errors, it is funny, see that ‘due’ for ‘do’ is from the Scrabble rote-learner who can’t spell, you defend that, and throw out another word that means something different from what you think.
It’s simply a typo. I’ve already acknowledged that I sometimes make them. BFD.
Meanwhile, you’ve made all sorts of wildly inaccurate and nonsensical claims, starting with this howler:
Sure they are.
[my bold]
And that’s why you keep dying in Nethack.
Perhaps not that one in particular, since you don’t remember it. You’re failing to remember some other particle of lore.
VG is indeed brain training if you play them as brain training. Much like books in that regard: reading a book is not necessarily an intellectual activity, no matter how ‘smart’ the book is. Whereas if you can get some reps in, it doesn’t matter how ‘dumb’ the thing is.
VG can be especially good brain training because the cycle between prediction and result is so fast.
Not particularly Nethack, though. It has few underlying principles – maybe even fewer than chess. Much more biology than physics. Prediction is a guessing game, and you can’t train luck. You can practice memorization on any game, except the part where memorization is not especially trainable.
Rather than say it isn’t true and call the commenter a smear word, bring up some information that proves your opposing point of view. If you don’t, you have no leg to stand on.
Serbs are quite proud of Tesla. I had no idea Einstein married one either. Given what I know about marriages between related persons of profession she may have done a lot without much credit.
Anyway, how did this discussion turn into a thread about Jews?
Much more parsimoniously explained by there being so many more people with IQ in that range than at the higher end. The normal curve declines steeply in the far tails.
Simply put, other skills matter as well and you are more likely to find people with extremes of those among the many more with IQs around 135.
No need to postulate things like the negative effects of higher IQs. Generally what you find is the higher IQs are even more over-represented relative to their proportion in the population.
This has to be the longest article ever written abut Scrabble.My only question is, why?
You are correct re. some rocks, but they aren’t really rocks, just marked a bit like rocks. Half the time the hidden item doesn’t help, or is negative.
Must admit, haven’t played for some time. I liked the Nintendo DS port. Still, never made it to the exit. Final level, many times, but never made it out.
Hit a normal rock, it’s just a wasted move.
There’s some reason you want to pick up a bunch of rocks. Which means you need to kick a bunch of rocks to test them for curses.
In theory this is great. Makes the world seem more real. If you can think of something you might realistically be able to do, Nethack will probably let you do it and will react in a meaningful way.
In practice, incredibly repetitive. If it was just this one thing, it would be a weird design oversight. Instead the whole game is this way.
Playing every game (that I’ve checked) with hardcore death is boring. The smart thing is to never take any risks. Never allow the game to fight back. Zero tension, and tons of grinding or farming.
They don’t have to be designed this way, but they always are.
Playing a zero-risk style should cap your achievement. Taking risks should be necessary to properly win. The gameplay should be about figuring out how to make the risks profitable (on average). It is likely the Empire will fall before anyone designs a game like this, though.
Related… The words “bow (and arrow)” and “bow (politely)” are _heteronyms_: they are spelled alike but are pronounced differently and have different meanings.
You have something of a point there, and we’d be better off if we didn’t have so many men emoting rather than reasoning about important matters in the stereotypical female manner.
But there are a vast number of men who subscribe “devoutly” to religions containing absurd, illogical, vicious, and just plain pointless “doctrines” — presumably in part because doing so gives them emotional satisfaction.
Ostensibly these men refuse to re-examine, let alone leave, the “package deal” they were given by their parents because it would be too emotionally upsetting (and perhaps embarrassing for them and offensive to family and friends).