One thought on “Tweet of the Day, This Image Strikes Me As Perfect, Somehow edition.”

  1. This reminds me of a friend from high school, who I think you would have found to be a kindred spirit. His name was Mark Stephens, and he was taken from us far too early by a drunk driver.

    Mark was an excellent writer, and was selected to represent our high school at the Memphis City Schools “WordSmith” writing contest. This was a writing-Olympics style competition, where people competed in various events — timed 200, 400, and 1,000 word competitions, and a Scrabble competition, where head-to-head matches were graded on the points scored. If you got a top-three finish in any individual event, there was a big medal round at the end of the day which you were eligible for. Mark was not quite at “Simone Biles” level of performance, but was definitely expected to do very well. He didn’t think that was enough of a guarantee, so he decided that he was going to do better in the Scrabble event than anyone in history.

    He looked at the rules, and realized that any word you played was acceptable, *as long as your opponent didn’t challenge it*. You could play a seven-letter combination of random consonants, and if your opponent didn’t challenge, then it counted. If you make an agreement with your opponent to not challenge each other’s plays, you can wind up with a truly phenomenal score, which Mark proceeded to do.

    As I recall (though it’s been over 30 years, so my memory is foggy), he managed to break 1,000 points… whereupon he decided that being the high scorer was *also* important to him, so he took it upon himself to challenge his opponent’s seventh play. When the judge came over, he agreed that combination of letters in question wasn’t actually a word… but nothing else on the board was, either.

    After consultation with the judges, the ultimate ruling was that he was within the letter of the rules, but was banned from future Scrabble competition. He accepted the ruling, went on to win the overall gold, and nobody mentioned it ever again. When I competed the next year, the Scrabble games were watched very closely, and I only found out the reason afterwards. 🙂

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