Scrabble. Rabble. Laser. Babe. Ale. As. It's your turn!

WashingtonExaminer.com: Scrabble. Rabble. Laser. Babe. Ale. As. It's your turn!

No man can serve both God and Mammon. Fair enough. But what about Scrabble? Can a person serve both God and the most enduringly gripping word game in the Western Hemisphere?
(Hemisphere! Premise. Miser. Pier. Him. Pi.)

I certainly hope so, because, like a lot of people lately, I've descended into the kind of Scrabble thralldom only possible in an era of magical hand-held devices.

(Devices. Sieved. Vice. Id!)

You used to need an actual board and actual people, physically in the same room, to get up a game. In those sepia-tinted, pre-iPhone days, a person might blow the dust off the Scrabble box and set the board up in the living room a couple of times a year. Only zealots played every weekend.

(Weekend. Keened. Kneed. Kwee? -- never mind.)

All that changed with the advent of electronic hand-held Scrabble boards, objects that are still sometimes puzzlingly referred to as "cell phones" or "laptops" or "Kindles." I don't know why people bother to use those terms, when obviously the purest purpose of the things is to allow you to move little letter tiles around and place them on a board, crossword-style, in such a way as to trounce your nears-and-dears -- or, for that matter, to beat "the computer" or a random opponent.

Now, with these wonderful devices, the amount of Scrabble a person can play is limited only by life's little distractions: your spouse and children, for instance, and God (or Mammon), and what you do to earn a paycheck.

If you are fortunate, however, your spouse and children will have become as obsessed with playing Scrabble as you, in which case you have the comfort of knowing that rather than subverting domesticity by drawing you into an electronic abstraction, Scrabble is only making your family stronger!

The same cannot be said for friendships. I have heard of several relationships that went through a frosty phase after prolonged bouts of long-distance Scrabble.

In one case, a player suspected his friend of secretly using a Scrabble website that took his lousy rack of vowels and helped turn it into a 70-point-scoring wonder. In another situation, a woman found so irksome her sister's propensity for playing short, highly remunerative words -- rather than long, swashbuckling, but lower-scoring ones -- that for a while she refused to play with her.

(Irksome. Smirk. Skim. Mire!)

Generally speaking, though, obsessive Scrabble play seems to have mostly benign -- if not outright comical -- side effects. It gives married couples a new reason to escape to the privacy of their bedrooms in the evenings. It causes street signs automatically to rearrange themselves before your very eyes, like tiles on a letter rack.

And, in our household, it has changed the way people talk. Once upon a time, the two most commonly heard sentences were: "What's for dinner?" and "We're late!"

Under the influence of Scrabble-mania, they have been replaced by: "Have you gone yet?" and "Your turn!"