Text and Whatsapp messaging may well be slowly eroding the English language, but at least we still have Scrabble to ensure it is somewhat preserved in its original form.

Or so we thought, until we saw the new list of the 6 500 or so words the game has added to its dictionary. Look away now if you hate text-speak, this ain’t no mega-LOLZ matter.

Below are some of the new additions, their meanings and their Scrabble word score, taken from the BBC:

Dench – meaning excellent – 11 points, Lotsa – meaning lots of – 5 points, Newb – short for newbie – 9 points, Thanx – short for thank you – 15 points and Cazh – meaning casual – 18 points.

I’m willing to bet Willie Shakespeare is more turning in his grave than ROFLing right now. But wait because, like a horrid late night commercial, there’s more:

 New words involving technology include facetime, hashtag, and sexting, while exclamations such as augh, blech, eew, grr, waah and yeesh have also been added.

I shall use those last six to express my dissatisfaction at their decision. Here’s the head of language content, Helen Newstead, justifying their inclusion:

Dictionaries have always included formal and informal English, but it used to be hard to find printed evidence of the use of slang words. Now people use slang in social media posts, tweets, blogs, comments, text messages – you name it – so there’s a host of evidence for informal varieties of English that simply didn’t exist before.

I’d like to submit a new word too, that word being ‘scrabturdz’. It earns the player zero points but when played they have the right to flip the board over, relentlessly mock any opponent using the word ‘eew’ and storm off claiming moral and intellectual superiority.

I await Scrabble’s 2016 additions with great anticipation.

[source:bbc]