The Q Factor

Lady Dawn and I have been engaged in a serious Scrabble competition since early 2007, and in that time we’ve played over 225 games -- this despite the fact that I was out at sea for 16 months of that time period. We’re pretty evenly matched, and no game is “just for fun”.

In a recent Scrabble outing at Sunken Meadow Park on Long Island, as we approached the end of Game #1, I concluded that Dawn had the “Q” on her rack. The dreaded letter was not in MY rack, nor was it out on the board, and the letter bag had just gone empty. It’s usually bad to be suddenly stuck with the “Q” at the very end of the game, because all four of the “U” letters may be already played. And a Q without a U is like a can without a can opener.

With total assurance I said “you’re stuck with the Q aren’t you?” She had a most quizzical look on her face and said “No Steve, I thought YOU were stuck with the Q.”

We looked at each other with the shocking realization that we’d been playing this game without the Q. We halted this suddenly-tainted game and futilely looked all over for the missing letter. Of all the letters to lose, why the Q? There’s only one Q in the whole set of 100 tiles.

What to do ? ! In the past I had jokingly (or angrily) talked about deliberately playing the game without the Q, for the fun of it. But now we had inadvertently done exactly that. And we were mildly surprised at how wrong it seemed. Even if the Q is the flaw in an otherwise perfect game, it has a storied past, and all the Scrabble games of our lives have included the annoying and angst-ridden Q.

For the next game we took an “O” tile and turned it into a Q, using a felt-tip pen. It was pretty ugly, and the game now had 7 O’s instead of 8, but at least the Q factor was re-established.

As the afternoon progressed it occurred to us where the lost Q might be. On the previous weekend we’d played Scrabble at a different park, a tiny place called Heckscher Park in downtown Huntington. We’d played on a wooden picnic table, the old-fashioned kind with the cracks in between the long planks. It seemed highly possible that our Q had fallen through the cracks. We now decided to visit this park later on, and search the dirt (and mud?) beneath that table.

We arrived at this table in the late afternoon, and it was happily occupied by some old ladies on a picnic. We explained our problem, and they were nice enough to step away while Dawn and I got on our hands and knees, picking through the mud. Yes, it had rained during the week. Sure enough, the mud-caked Q turned up after 30 seconds. It seemed like the little wooden tile had absorbed some moisture during its week underneath the picnic table, and was slightly larger and misshapen. Now it would be doubly unpleasant to pull this thing out of the bag.

Well, not exactly. If I remember correctly, the manufacturer has a reasonable policy of replacing lost letters for free. So I’ll be looking into getting a new Q, plus a new “O” to replace the one we destroyed in our desperation to have a Q.

Dawn and I do not adhere very much to the ultra-liberal Official Scrabble Dictionary, even though we keep one around. We have a give-and-take system, where any word we’ve “heard of” is good.

Back in 1998-99, during my brief foray into tournament Scrabble, I tried to memorize Official word lists, which included a plethora of weird Q-words, J-words, Z-words, and K-words, and hundreds of arcane 2 and 3-letter words. I didn’t know the meaning of most of these words, and I didn’t care. As a tournament player, I knew my opponent would be using them too, so I had to try and keep up.

On some level I felt that this robotic rote memorization of words, made necessary by cut-throat competition and the highly liberal Official Scrabble Dictionary, was a corruption of the original intent of the game. More and more I felt uncomfortable, increasingly sucked into this word-memorization vortex. It was ruining my love of the game, and I finally dropped out of tournament play.

The 1998 Official Scrabble Dictionary had a handful of “Q-without-the-U words” -- qat, qaid, qanat, qoph, qabala, and faqir, and they were quite necessary to know for tournaments. This of course took some of the stress out of the Q factor. However this was a tiny gain compared to the overall requirement of memorizing a ton of idiotic useless words for competitive Scrabble.

More recently, just a few months ago, the new 2010 edition of the Scrabble Dictionary came out, with a revolutionary change. From now on, “qi” is an accepted word. It’s an alternate spelling for “chi”, which is a Chinese name for life-energy.

It is revolutionary because “qi” is an extremely easy word to come up with. Very easy and possibly high-scoring, because the Q is still worth 10 points. It is certainly a constant new presence in tournament Scrabble. It’s the equivalent of lengthening the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. The average Scrabble score will increase by a few points.

And perhaps a few more people will play the game. Even on the non-tournament “living room level”, everybody will come to know that “qi” is a legit word, an answer to a prayer, a huge reduction in the Q factor of Scrabble.

Dawn and I will reject this word along with all the other phony words that the Scrabble Association has concocted. We should all deal with the Q Factors in our lives, appreciate their character-building qualities, and not let the powers-that-be make wimps and robots out of us, in Scrabble and elsewhere.