Scrabbled
by Philip Martin Cohen
To celebrate their twenty fifth anniversary, Gustav and Iris launched their sailboat from Miami for a month’s cruise around the Caribbean.
As they neared the Bermuda Triangle, tragedy hit. The boat sank. Gustav and Iris managed to save themselves, and, like modern day Robinson Crusoes, they found themselves on a tropical isle alone among the flowers and trees.
That their daily routine was disrupted was most distressing. In particular, they now couldn’t engage in their daily Scrabble game. In good times and bad, wherever life took them, Gustav and Iris played Scrabble every day. So evenly matched were they that over the years neither dominated. Their daily sally into the famous word game increased their vocabulary, even as it continually sharpened their ability to squeeze every last point out of any situation on the board the fates might present. Their scores were always high, but never more than a few points apart one from the other. For Gustav and Iris their Scrabble game provided an essential balance to their married lives.
On the island they were bereft of the tools needed to play: the board, those tiny squares containing letters and their point value, those wooden stands for the letters to rest upon, and, naturally, a dictionary to provide the element of truth in their play. Not that they would ever cheat, heaven forefend. But every now and then their OED had to be impressed into service just to adjudicate a claim that this or that word actually existed and was actually spelled that way.
In the early days on the island, as they scrambled to establish the means needed for long term survival---shelter, food and the like—they were unable to reconstruct their daily foray into letters, words, and points, and it showed in their demeanor. They became cranky; a critical piece of their lives had been taken from them. Their partnership hung over the abyss.
Well, glory halleluyah. One day a genuine miracle occurred. Among the flotsam that occasionally washed in on the tide from the sailboat, their Scrabble game came floating in like the cavalry to the rescue. Because its last resting place was on a boat, where a sudden jolt might have knocked it to the ground spilling the contents, the box had been secured shut by a rubber band. Now, soaked through and through, the board, the pieces and their wooden stands emerged from this waterlogged box more or less intact. The board was a mess, but careful drying in the tropical sun made it useful more than a bit warped. Until they were rescued, this would do. Life’s meaning returned.
“We have no dictionary,” Iris said to Gustav.
“No matter,” Gustav responded with confidence. “We hardly ever needed one. Why, I’ve often thought we could do
without one. Now we can test my thesis.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Iris, anxious to get on with things.
And get on they did. In the midst of foraging for food and fresh water, maintaining their shelter and attempting to contact the outside world, every afternoon as the sun began its westerly course toward the day’s end, they would sit with the board between them and engage in the contest that had been their hallmark for decades.
But the days passed, Iris became depressed. Perhaps it was the heat; perhaps it was the diet of passion fruit and the occasional fish. Perhaps it was the deformed Scrabble board. Perhaps it was the absence of the dictionary. Whatever the cause, Iris became increasingly unhappy. One morning, without Gustav noticing (perhaps he was too busy attempting to spear a fish), she just snapped.
The change manifested itself in that afternoon’s game.
About halfway through, after a long hesitation, with sweat dripping down her face, Iris laid down the word, “kneplant”. Triumphantly, Iris counted her many points and sat back wearing a broad smile. “All seven letters,” she said, meaning, of course, an extra fifty points.
Gustav stared. Quietly he asked, “Dear, what’s a kneplant?”
Iris said, “Oh come now. You know what a kneplant is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“A kneplant is a female mersht.”
Gustav did not like where this was going. “And a mersht…what’s a mersht?”
“Oh my, dear husband, how forgetful our time on this island has made you. A mersht is a kind of pert that on a resif blonds. “
Gustav drew in his breath. Knepl, mersht, pert, resif, and blond (clearly not a reference to hair color)---five words whose reality, in the absence of a dictionary, could be neither verified nor refuted. He could argue, but he had no way to prove his claim. Gustav exhaled with the realization he had to accept Iris’s words.
Iris’s creativity continued through the remainder of the game. Gustav challenged one more time, and then gave up.
He lost by two hundred and fifty points.
He had a miserable night’s sleep.
The next day at the game Gustav put out the first word: imprect .
“Excuse me my husband,” Iris said, “but I cannot recall the meaning of the word “imprect”. Would you kindly inform me of its definition.”
“Simple, of course,” answered Gustav with authority. “Imprect means intubulac wipparsteng. Of course, imprect is something we do times several daily.
“Of course. How forgetful of me. In fact I think that will I go and imprect now right,” Iris responded and immediately walked away. She returned ten minutes later to continue the game.
Now that both of them understood the rules, they could compete properly. Their former competitiveness returned. They created new words at the rate of approximately thirty per game.
Approximately a year later, Gustav and Iris were discovered by a passing ship. When they boarded the vessel, the captain, a quite multi-lingual fellow, was surprised when he realized that he could not establish what language the rescued couple was speaking.
