John Mather
Editor-in-Chief
Fe is not a word.
It is the periodic symbol for ferrous, also known as iron.
Qi is not an English word. It is a Chinese word having something to do with Chinese philosophy.
Those two faux words are the reason I lasted three moves in Scrabulous, Facebook’s online Scrabble game.
By allowing stupid two-letter words from other languages, Scrabulous has sucked the life out of the classic board game. S
crabble should be wholesome fun between friends and family; it should be a competition of vocabulary and creativity, not the ability to store nonsense words in your head.
My frustrations started after my one game of Scrabulous, which was against Jamie, the paper’s photo editor.
I quit three moves in because Jamie scored 43 points on the word QI, placed on a triple letter score. Earlier, he had thrown down FE, and I went ballistic.
Those two words — along with BA, AA, and the rest — simply reduce Scrabble to a complicated, two player version of Sudoku with words.
Someone has pointed out that Fe is a Hebrew letter — which would be super if I was playing Hebrew Scrabble.
And when would you use Fe or Qi in everyday speech?
No one says: “I missed the bus because I forget my Fe at home.” Or: “Wow you look really Qi tonight.”
Jamie thinks I’m a sore loser.
“I feel that you are a weak-minded boy in a man’s body, with a pathetic, closed-minded sense of vocabulary,” he said.
He attributes my quitting to the fact that I am an ego-manical sociopath who is incapable of believing that I am not the best at everything.
Fair point, Jamie. Maybe I did quit because I was going to lose. There was no way I could compete with your endless knowledge of useless foreign words and abbreviations.
But I believe I quit to make a point.
Anyone out there who has never thrown Fe at someone, or who hasn’t let off a Qi in public, should never play Scrabulous.
It is supposed to be a game of dignity. Instead it has become a game of petty one-upsmanship.
You can all go Fe yourselves.
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