Foundring

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Thank you.

I'll do my intro in a moment.

That almost makes up for the fact that I'm not having a James's big birthday bash this year.

I had this amazing event last year called James's big birthday bash.

And It was great.

And I was going to do one this year with a guy called...

Have you come across John Waters? Irish.

Irish rock journalist.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

He's great.

He's great.

He was going to come, but unfortunately he was ill.

So I cancelled it in any way.

I hadn't left enough time for people to book their tickets.

I'm quite slapdash about these things.

But I really like it when our people are people.

When we all come together and we realise that we're not alone, that other people...

We are one of us, one of us.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Although it was Margaret Thatcher who used that phrase, one of us.

Is that right? Well, that was, is he one of us? And at the time, when I was like a sort of, I thought of myself as a sort of conservative stroke, libertarian, outspoken...

commentator fighting the leftist hegemony.

I was like, go Margaret Thatcher.

She's our heroine.

Well, she's our hero, really.

She's more a man than a man.

She's great.

The word is shero.

Yeah, shero.

Yeah, exactly.

It's an official Scrabble word, by the way.

It is or it isn't? It is.

It is.

To replace all the words that we can't use now because they're insensitive.

Also, her story is a word now.

Is it?

Yeah.

But they took out goy

for being a slur.

Did they really? Yep.

Well, that's nice of them.

It's good that we are interested in being protected.

But is Goyim still in there?

No, anything Goy related has been removed.

Goyish was removed.

Goyim and Goy are all...

This is the International English Scalpel Dictionary.

They're removed.

But...

I know this because there have been words which I've tried to use and have made the mistake of consulting the online international Scrabble dictionary and found that a perfectly decent word, effective word in the vocabulary has been excised for politically correct reasons.

It's

even more

frustrating and complicated because the...

American Scrabble Dictionary has a different list of expurgated words than the International Scrabble Dictionary.

So recently they added goy back in the American Dictionary.

So we can actually, I can play goy when I'm playing Scrabble in the U.S., but not anywhere else.

Goy would actually be quite a useful word.

I mean, because that y is quite difficult sometimes to...

So here, you can actually play

wygo.

Y-G-O is an anagram of what, right? G-O-Y? Yeah.

In the international vocabulary, why go? It's like old English ego, where they put the Y in front of word sometimes.

Oh, you mean like ego, it went.

It went, it went.

It thunder is word.

It's like past tense.

It's like Chaucer English something.

Yeah.

Those terms are allowed.

Eclept.

Eclept.

Eclept means cold.

Cold.

And there's the ped, which is the past tense, or P-E-D-E-Y-C-L-E-P-E-D.

Those are both words, and they work in actually the English one.

Those are rare ones.

You sound like you've been playing Scrabble at quite a high level.

For 20 years.

Have you done competitions?

Not officially.

First of all, I would be banned now because they are very woke.

They did the vaccine mandate pretty hard.

And so the whole community kind of fractured a lot of these niche hobbyist things during COVID.

Also, that was when the expurgation happened, right? So they purged the dictionary with hundreds of words, and there were people that were on either side.

The purists wanted all the work allowed, and then the ones wanted everything removed.

And that was basically the same folks that were on either side of the COVID debate.

So we all kind of fractured.

But long story short, I've been in the Scrabble community for two decades, but I've never really been interested in doing the competition thing.

But I do... compete against those guys daily for money.

So it is a for-profit thing for me.

So I play competitions online every morning when I wake up.

Wow.

So tell me, I've always wondered, when I've got some letters which are kind of promising but not all there yet, Do I kind of, when it's my go, do I try and preserve the letters and just do a crap short word in the hope that I might get a decent set of letters? Or do you always go for the highest points you can at any given turn?

Great question.

I would say even more important than the actual play that you make is what you leave on the tiles behind.

In fact, that is a higher consideration a lot of the times.

You absolutely will do a dump little throwaway play if you keep... five solid letters that and players know what the probability is usually with how many letters are left to get the best combination a best chance of a high scoring play on the next turn so it's a very that's an important part

of travel strategy Do you know what? It's so sad.

In fact, before I talk about what's sad, I should do my intro.

This has been like the intro to an American sitcom where you have the segment before.

There's a sort of self-contained comedic scene, probably on shows that we now wouldn't like very much, like Seinfeld or...

Friends.

Friends, exactly, Friends.

With the paleontologist.

You should play the

Friends intro.

No one told us that was gonna be this way.

Yes, yes, yes.

That's what we should do.