Monday, November 24, 2008

A Copyeditor Plays Scrabble


The Girl and The Boy gave me Scrabble for the computer; I play it when I'm killing time.

Tonight I grabbed a double-letter score w/ M (3 points, x 2), and the triple word score, including the C (3). The word: MICS.

Which I HATE!
 
I hate it, I hate it. We *have* a word: mike. The "mic" is what the sound techs write on the equipment bcs there literally isn't room for the 4th letter.

An "open mic"--open mick?

The other word (all 1's, but I wiped out another triple word score): noun.

"How copyeditor of you," The Husband said.

Someday I'll write about playing Password. (shudder)

What word-geek words have *you* played?

4 comments:

Jim Donahue said...

I am oddly inept at Scrabble--Will almost always wins.

TootsNYC said...

If you want to play to WIN, you have to ignore "how cool a word is THAT!" and focus on the number of points you can get.

Winning at Scrabble is totally business. No creativity.

kidicarus222 said...

I actually never understood why "mic" was inferior to "mike," but then my copy editor pointed out that the m-i-k-e version better lends itself to being a verb --- as in, "The singer is miked." --- and that it also cannot be mistaken for the derogatory word for an Irish person when used in print.

TootsNYC said...

It's also older, and more established.

And, "mike" follows the established rules of pronunciation.

"mic" is properly pronounced "mick"

We have bike, trike, mike--all shortened forms of words that don't have a K.

I think 'mic" came from soundboards or the backs of amps, where they could use larger letters if they used fewer of them, so they just used the first 3.

And all those folks USING the amps and soundboards simply started using that spelling.

Sort of like "compute intensive"--the actual users of the word got their hands on it without asking us word folks first.