Sad news about David Shulman (Scrabble dict. story)

[Victoria Neufeldt]

On Tuesday, November 02, 2004 1:44 PM, Fred Shapiro wrote:
. . . .
> My favorite memory of David involved a ridiculously flawed
> article about
> "The Words of Scrabble" published in American Speech in the
> mid-1980s.
> The author analyzed the words in the Official Scrabble
> Player's Dictionary
> and concluded that this lexicon was way ahead of the
> new-word watchers in
> Springfield and Oxford in picking up novel vocabulary.  I
> discovered that,
> in addition to the author's failing to realize that this
> book was compiled
> by Merriam-Webster, the author had done a terrible job of
> checking earlier
> dictionaries and missed the fact that a lot of the
> supposedly novel words
> had previously appeared in Webster's Collegiate.  David,
> employing his
> characteristic methodicalness and driven by his own strong
> interest in the
> game of Scrabble, found that in fact all of the words had
> appeared in
> earlier dictionaries and the article author had concocted a
> theory with
> absolutely no basis in reality.  Both my response and David's were
> published in American Speech; I wanted to call mine
> "Scrabble Babble" but
> Ron Butters wouldn't let me.  David adopted a more restrained and
> gentlemanly tone in his piece.

An amazing story.  I don't remember reading that article.  The fact is
that not only is the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary published
by M-W, but the dictionary's editors (who are not M-W people) have
always followed a policy of entering only words that appear in at
least one of the four principal U.S. college dictionaries: M-W's
Collegiate, Webster's New World, American Heritage, and Random House.
I have never checked, but I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a
statement to that effect somewhere in the introductory matter of the
dictionary.

Victoria

Victoria Neufeldt
727 9th Street East
Saskatoon, Sask.
S7H 0M6
Canada
Tel: 306-955-8910



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