Scrabble dabble doo

So I went to play Scrabble last night with the Bahraini pros. Despite the sense I get that I’m the only person in this country who can spell – and I’m the dyslexic one around here – I lost.

With the amount of times one sees “thier” instead of “their”, there is a serious case for its inclusion in the Bahrain Oxford Dictionary. Others include exhibiton and juces. My favourite, from the government website, is constantly referring to the successor to the “thrown”. Unfortunately they’re mostly just sad, not funny, and far too frequent to post. Besides, I blush covertly, because I barely afford these blog posts a cursory scan after my keyboard splurge, so who knows how low I’ve sank.

I think it’s got something to do with the pronunciation. It seems Arabic is a very vowel-based language, so they accentuate these sounds. I’m still struggling to decipher it – I have to train myself to listen differently. Sth Africns tend to clp thir vowls. Sic of lways sking pepl to rpet thmselvs, I often just nod. It works in small talk.

But back to the Scrabble, because scrabble is more about maths than language – identifying and remembering series and resolving anagrams is a mathematical skill – I played the 16th seed Gulf player. They had the Gulf Championships here over the weekend, which is how I learnt about the club. He was actually quite impressed, even though I lost. Twice. But both times my score reached at least 330 and he’s feeling threatened. A month, he says, and I’ll be beating him.

So, for all you naysayers who said I’d be playing Bridge, not Scrabble, I’m going to return with a world rating! Heck, it’s better than staring at my walls and one way to make sure I don’t catch this country’s spellingtitis.