How do you like those fracti?

You immediately knew what is wrong with the title of this post, don’t you?

Since a qindarka, as anyone in outer Albania knows, is equal to 100 lek, this would be a pretty lopsided game of poker.

And you no doubt had a pretty good yock at my expense.

But does it hurt my feelings that you laughed boisterously at me? Nah. I’ll just boff heartily along with you.

Your ordinary man-about-town may not recognize the above bold-faced words, but a devoted Scrabble player who is eidetic (possessed of vivid recall) will have at least a nodding acquaintance with some.

That which is pyic is often xanthic, which means pus-ish stuff tends to be yellow.

If you see a chacma in a cwm on the side of a jebel you are, in the non-Scrabble world of language, looking at a baboon in a hollow on the side of a mountain.

You want to write a scathing commentary on the state of humankind via analogy using the chacma stuck, through no fault of its own, in the cwm which is stuck, through no fault of its own (but rather the fault of a cold and heartless glacier) in the mountain.

But with one thing (preparing to celebrate the yahrzeit—anniversary of the death of an ancestor celebrated by Jews) and another (you are part of a busy and creative krewe, a private group participating in Mardi Gras) your magnum opus has shrunk to the size of a opuscule (a minor work).

Fracti are ragged clouds and gjetost is hard brown cheese and a fyke is a bag-shaped fishnet and all are acceptable in Scrabble.

pfft and psst and sh and hm? Legit.

Alif, bubu, and a thousand others have no meaning but are still recognized. No doubt some ambitious Scrabble player with connections in the Scrabble Word Approval Department begged for them.

The Prude plans to cozy up to someone with clout at the Scrabble Dictionary and get ca approved. It’s the sound made by the chacma trapped in the cwm.