nada Sara on 10 Apr 2008 10:01 pm
Qi, what?
I am the first to admit that I have horrible grammar and use lame Southern expressions, but something has been irking me about the recent evolution of American English. I can handle the pseudo gangsta talk (f’realz, yo) and the shortened haiku of IM and SMS speak (i <3 u, c ya). But, when words that aren’t verbs become one because of a fad (scrapbooking, journaling) or words that people have never heard and don’t know what mean are now being used daily thanks to technology like facebook’s scrabulous (qi, xis), I just can’t help but cringe.
on 10 Apr 2008 at 10:53 pm 1.Pinky said …
Xis is just the plural of xi, a well-known Greek letter and probably a fraternity somewhere known as the Xi House. What irks me about Scrabble is that they’ll accept some new (or abbreviated, or foreign) words (vet, guv, ciao, veg, blog, email, om, za, ag, fiesta, etc) but not others that seem just as acceptable (zen, ade, chilpayatl, etc)
on 11 Apr 2008 at 6:18 am 2.mark Dionne said …
Zen is a religion, and hence capitalized, which prohibits it in Scrabble.
on 14 Apr 2008 at 6:45 pm 3.clare said …
Any greek letters are permissible in Scrabble (I had to memorize the alphabet when I started dating Ben), as are spelled-out letters used for printing, e.g. “em”, “en”, and the diatonic scale do, re, mi, etc. But those are all pretty familiar to english speakers; I hate it when words that seem foreign are allowed in scrabble. No words that I don’t know should be allowed.