OF A GOLDEN AGE

About a month ago I started playing Scrabble with an informal Chicago group. Today a tournament player (who issued two sound beatdowns) told me that in official play you aren’t allowed to discuss the definitions of words — only whether or not they’re legal plays in the context of the game. The reason for this is strategic and psychological: if you’re good enough at bullshitting, you can psych an opponent into believing a word AND playing erroneously on it.

Here’s an example: let’s say I invent a word or use something incorrect, say “omoo.” Omoo is a Herman Melville novel, but it looks wordy enough that I might get it past someone. My opponent asks what it means and I say, without missing a beat, “It’s a wild cat.” Subsequently, my opponent pluralizes it and makes another word, and now I get to challenge it and take back his or her play.

Anyway, that’s the rationale, protecting players from your bullshit AND your psychouts all in one fell swoop.

I thought about this again just now while listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, where the host interviewed Ward Cunningham, the developer of the original wiki. The host asked Cunningham if he didn’t fear the inevitable failure of Wikipedia, precisely because its accessibility is also its greatest vulnerability. Cunningham said he feared that no more than he feared a house fire. He said, though, that Wikipedia has the power to change history through the manipulation of “truth,” for better or worse, emphasizing how malleable facts can be in hindsight. (This is the reason that, for instance, the Holocaust denial movement will probably pick up steam as the number of eyewitnesses is whittled down. Not that these eyewitnesses have done much to deter those committed to the delusion.)

Always, always, these confusions about what’s the truth and what’s just said convincingly. Even nature does it — fish with artificial lures to draw prey, butterflies with mock eyes on their wings to frighten predators.

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