The Scribble on Scrabble

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Scribble on Scrabble" – Stuff You Should Know

Release Date: March 11, 2025
Hosts: Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry
Producer: iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction to Scrabble

The episode kicks off with Josh expressing his long-standing desire to delve into the world of Scrabble, a request that Chuck had previously resisted. After persistent encouragement from Josh and Jerry, Chuck finally agrees to explore the intricacies of the beloved word game.

Notable Quote:
Josh Clark [00:54]: "Here we are finally talking about Scrabble. I've been asking for you to do this with me for at least a decade and you kept refusing."

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2. Overview of Scrabble Rules and Gameplay

Chuck provides a fundamental explanation of Scrabble, highlighting it as a board game where two to four players use letter tiles to create words in a crossword-like manner. The discussion covers key aspects such as the 15x15 board layout, the significance of the center square for the first word, and the concept of "bingo"—playing all seven tiles in one turn for a bonus.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Bryant [02:18]: "Scrabble is a board game in which two to four players use letters, little tiles, to spell out words on a board in a crossword-like fashion."

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3. Strategic Elements and Scoring Enhancements

The hosts delve into advanced strategies, including the utilization of bonus squares—triple word, double word, double letter, and triple letter scores—to maximize points. They also discuss the significance of high-value letters like J, X, Q, and Z, and the impact of using blank tiles as wildcards.

Notable Quote:
Josh Clark [04:26]: "Across the board, there's triple word scores, double word scores, double letter scores, and triple letter scores. When you lay a tile over these, you get bonus points."

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4. Scrabble's History and Evolution

A comprehensive overview of Scrabble's origins is provided, tracing its invention to Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938. The narrative covers how James Brunot acquired the rights, rebranded the game as "Scrabble," and propelled its popularity through strategic manufacturing and marketing efforts, including the pivotal involvement of Macy's president.

Notable Quote:
Josh Clark [16:34]: "He wanted to invent a game that was part chance, part skill."

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5. Competitive Scrabble and Tournaments

The episode explores the competitive landscape of Scrabble, detailing the establishment of the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) and the organization of national tournaments. The hosts discuss the fluctuating popularity of Scrabble tournaments over the years, influenced by factors such as documentaries like "Word Freaks" and internal community dynamics.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Bryant [27:40]: "There were 75,000 rated Scrabble tournament games in 2004, and by 2019, that number was cut almost in half."

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6. Cognitive and Neurological Insights

Josh shares fascinating studies on how playing Scrabble affects the brain. High-level Scrabble players engage different brain regions compared to casual players, emphasizing spatial reasoning and rapid word recognition without attaching meanings to words. Additionally, playing Scrabble has been linked to mitigating age-related memory loss and Alzheimer's, especially in individuals without higher education degrees.

Notable Quote:
Josh Clark [34:35]: "Competitive Scrabble players use regions of their brains that most people wouldn't use and process words much more quickly by focusing on letter combinations rather than meanings."

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7. Controversies and Ethical Issues

The discussion addresses controversies surrounding Scrabble, including the inclusion and subsequent removal of offensive words from official dictionaries. Hosts highlight efforts by activists like Judith Grad and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League to cleanse the game of racial slurs, balancing sensitivity with the integrity of the game.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Bryant [38:31]: "There is a list. I think there was a woman named Judith Grad in the '90s who kind of got on her soapbox to have the slurs removed."

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8. Cheating Scandals in Scrabble

An infamous cheating incident from 2011 is recounted, where a young champion was caught manipulating blank tiles. The hosts critique the oversight in tournament management, emphasizing the importance of strict regulation to maintain fairness and integrity in competitive play.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Bryant [42:50]: "And he had already been banned for cheating. He palmed tiles too. He was a national champion. He got suspended for four years for cheating."

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9. Scrabble in Pop Culture

The hosts briefly touch upon Scrabble's appearances in popular media, including references in "Rosemary's Baby," "Seinfeld," and "Calvin and Hobbes." They also humorously note its indirect influence on the creation of other board games like "Trivial Pursuit."

Notable Quote:
Chuck Bryant [48:57]: "Scrabble has not appeared in any other part of pop culture except for those things, right?"

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10. Listener Interaction and Mental Visualization

Towards the end, Chuck shares an anecdote about a listener named Daisy discussing how she visualizes a calendar in her mind differently from others. This segues into a light-hearted exploration of mental imagery and cognitive diversity among individuals.

Notable Quote:
Chuck Bryant [49:12]: "A while back, I have no idea where the idea came from. I wonder whether everyone sees concepts the same way in their head as I do."

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Conclusion

Josh and Chuck wrap up the episode by expressing their gratitude to Chuck for finally agreeing to discuss Scrabble, embracing the depth and breadth of the topic. They encourage listeners to share their own mental visualizations and experiences, fostering a sense of community among Scrabble enthusiasts and curious minds alike.

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Additional Notes:

• The episode is rich with humorous banter and personal anecdotes, making complex topics accessible and entertaining.
• The hosts maintain an engaging pace, interweaving factual information with light-hearted commentary.
• Despite the technical depth, the conversation remains approachable for both Scrabble aficionados and newcomers interested in the game's nuances.

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Key Takeaways:

• Scrabble is not only a popular word game but also a competitive sport with a dedicated community.
• The game's history is marked by strategic business decisions that propelled its global reach.
• Playing Scrabble can have significant cognitive benefits, influencing brain function and potentially mitigating memory-related ailments.
• Controversies around word inclusions reflect broader societal shifts towards sensitivity and inclusion.
• Integrity in competitive play is paramount, with stringent measures necessary to prevent and address cheating.

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For More Information:
To delve deeper into the topics discussed or to share your own Scrabble experiences and mental visualizations, visit Stuff You Should Know on iHeartRadio.

Transcript

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[iHeartRadio Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know. Good old fashioned pop culture games edition.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And yeah, here we are finally talking about Scrabble. I've been asking for you to do this with me for at least a decade and you kept refusing. I still don't know why. Even Jerry chimed in and was like, will you guys please do Scrabble? And finally you relented, I think just because you wanted me and Jerry to stop bothering you about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was probably it. A big thanks to Laura for her help on this one. What was your nickname for her?

[Josh Clark]

Dr. Claw.

[Chuck Bryant]

Dr. Claw. Do you play Scrabble? Are you a Scrabbler? I just kind of wanted to get that out of the way, you know?

[Josh Clark]

I wish I were. I'm not. And it's not like I have an aversion to it or anything like that. It's just not part of my world, I guess, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, same. I mean, we own it. And I have played Scrabble here and there. If somebody's like, hey, let's play Scrabble, I won't go like, no, sorry, not gonna do it. But, you know, I'll play very occasionally. But I've never been a regular Scrabbler, nor am I very good at it at all. Especially if I'm playing against somebody who you know, because there's a lot more to it than just, like, knowing words.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I feel like based on stuff, you should know, history, our best episodes are ones where we explain games that we don't actually play. Soccer. Chess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, the list just keeps going on and it feels like we're about to add to it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Surfing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, surfing.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, we should probably just say that. Scrabble. If you don't know it's a board game in which two to four players use letters, little tiles, to spell out words on a board in a crossword like fashion.

[Josh Clark]

Wow, that was a good description, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

In other words, you know, the words have to intersect each other. You can't just throw a random word out there in the corner if you feel like it. They have to touch and use a letter or I guess, a blank space for another word.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And by the way, I just want to go ahead and. Cause Scrabble people are probably going to get mad at us, but I'm going to go ahead and throw out a suggested rule change.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

There is a word Scrabble, and that means as a verb, to scratch or grope, to try and collect something, or as a noun, the act of doing that. And I propose that if you play that eight letter word, that not only do you get your bingo bonus for playing a seven letter word, I think you should. If you play the word Scrabble, you should get an extra bonus on top.

[Josh Clark]

Of that of how many points, Million, Whatever's fair.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's where I just step back and say, you guys handle it okay.

[Josh Clark]

You like to kick the hornet's nest and then watch them go.

[Chuck Bryant]

I just think, I don't know. If you play the word Scrabble, give it just a little bump.

[Josh Clark]

I agree. I think you're right.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. That's my only suggestion.

[Josh Clark]

My only note a little more about it. The scrabble board is 15 by 15 squares. 225 total squares. And because it's 15 by 15, you're limited to no more than 15 letter words.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

And I guess just a quick summary of the rules. So when you play that first word, you have to play it in the center square. That's where you start. And you can build off of other people's words. You get up to 15 letter words by building onto other words. Because you could never spell more than a seven letter word. Because at no point in time do you ever have more than seven tiles.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And as I said, that seven tiles played at once is called a bingo. You add up your score at the end and tack on 50 points at that point.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or however many you get. Apparently experts can play like, you know, three, four or five of those in a game sometimes.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a great way to run up scores from what I can tell. And then across the board there's triple word scores, double word scores, double letter scores and triple letter scores. And basically when you lay a tile over that, depending on whether it's a letter or a word, you get bonus points for it. So when you're like, like if you play a bingo across like a triple word score, you got a bunch of points. You basically just dusted your opponent in that one move. Essentially, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, if you're just sort of amateur funsies, Scrabble people, one big bingo like that can seal the game for you.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's called sending them packing with tears in their eyes.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think in France, by the way, the bingo is called a Scrabble. Just other nuts and bolts. You know, the tiles come in a little. They're little wooden tiles, little wooden square tiles. And on the tile is a letter and then a point value sort of as a subscript. And then you keep your letters on a little wooden tile rack. And ideally your opponent does not see those like, you know, they're facing away from you if you're opposite your opponent. And that's a big part of like an expert or at least an accomplished or experienced Scrabbleist is dummies like me and I guess you, if you and I played, we'd just sit down and try and spill fart every chance we got. If you're an experienced Scrabbleist, you're almost like counting cards. Like, you know how many letters are in the bag of like how many of each letter are in the bag and you see them being played, you know how many are on your rack, you know how many are still in the pile. So you're sort of trying to figure out mathematical possibilities of what's still out there and what can be played. Like that's the next level stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. And it's not like evenly distributed. For example, there's 12 E's, but there's only one J, K, Q, X and Z. And then the other letters are just kind of distributed in weird random ways so that like you could, I guess, easily count that stuff. If you play Scrabble enough, you're just going to pick up on how many are out there at any given point.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, you've also got your blank tiles, which are worth zero points, but those really help out in making words possible that you couldn't get ordinarily. And then you've got your one pointers, A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T and you.

[Josh Clark]

And also just real quick, I did some poking around, Chuck, and I found that there's some mnemonic devices that like tournament level players use to remember how many points a particular letter gets.

[Chuck Bryant]

You should say that after I list them All.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I was going to just do it by group, if that's okay with you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So the first group, one point, they use astronauts. Eat in limbo. No. Right. Silly tiger umbrella.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, the two pointers are D.

[Josh Clark]

And G. Dave and Gary.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I would say doggone three points are B, C, M and P. That.

[Josh Clark]

Is B. Chewing and masticating pizza.

[Chuck Bryant]

Does someone really suggest, like, hey, use these and don't make up your own.

[Josh Clark]

No, I'm making this up.

[Chuck Bryant]

I gotcha. This is all a bit. Okay, four points. We got F, H, V and W and Y.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So for heaven's vake, Y, U, V.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I get it now. You should have told me this was a bit. Five pointers, you get your K. K. Okay. Eight pointers.

[Josh Clark]

J and X. Jackson loves Xanax.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. Jackson loves.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you just have to ignore the.

[Chuck Bryant]

L, then your ten pointer. Josh, what are we going to end up with? Q and Z?

[Josh Clark]

Quartz. And quartz.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's great. I think I got it.

[Josh Clark]

You got it? Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Give me a quiz at the end. I'll put this away and then you can just quiz me.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Once you learn that, you'll never forget it.

[Chuck Bryant]

There is a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon, Andrew Thomas, who says if you go first, you have an advantage of 14 points. If you have that blank tile ever in the game, that's an advantage of 30 points. If you're good at Scrabble. Not like me.

[Josh Clark]

Right. There's also like, if you have S tiles, there's a 10 point advantage. And the reason why I was like, that doesn't make any sense because S, as you remember from your Mnemonic device, is only a one point tile.

[Chuck Bryant]

You should throw that on the end though, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's the thing. So like, if you add, like I said, you can add on to other words that are already on the board, even ones another player wrote out. And whatever word score they got for that word, if you add an S, you get that same word score plus one point for the S. So that's a really easy way to rack up some quick points and I think also probably annoy other players.

[Chuck Bryant]

I wonder about that. I'd like to hear from Scrabblers. I mean, if it's fair game, it's fair game.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. But there's plenty of rules that are fair game that are also like, you're a jackass.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a good point. Let me see here. What else do we have? We have X and Z give you a three to five point advantage, even though they're tougher to use. And the Q is a five point disadvantage because, I mean, I was about to say you always have to have that U, but I'm sure there are weird Scrabble words that don't have a Q. U.

[Josh Clark]

There's two that I know of. One is key.

[Chuck Bryant]

Qi. Yeah, I think I heard that.

[Josh Clark]

Q I or no, sorry, that's chi. Life force, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

And you get 11 points for that one. And then I can't remember, there's one more that's like a Q word that does not require a U. Oh, no.

[Chuck Bryant]

Qi is in here because that's the highest scoring two letter word along with za. Is that what you said?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and I looked up Z a za and it's slang for pizza. I'm not certain that that usage is allowed, but it's also a archaic word for a B flat notation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I wonder if. Cause I did the same thing you did every time they gave in. Laura found an example of a word that's unusual or high scoring. I always looked it up because I was curious. I wonder if that's part of the love of Scrabble is actually learning what these words mean or if they're like, I really don't care. I just care how much it's worth.

[Josh Clark]

Well, from what I can tell, Scrabble players don't care what a word means. They don't think of them like that. And I mean, that'll come up later with those controversial words. Oh, sure, yeah, it's just us. We're curious types. Scrabble players are not.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's true. The highest scoring three letter word is zax 19 pointer and zek is 16. Quiz is a four letter word worth the most at 22.

[Josh Clark]

That means like a test of sorts.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, and then zippy. What does that mean?

[Josh Clark]

The pinhead.

[Chuck Bryant]

Zippy the Pinhead. What's that?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, it's a really weird 80s comic strip. You know the clown with the Zippy the pinhead.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I don't know it.

[Josh Clark]

You should look it up. It's weird. It's a weird comic strip.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I don't know it, but it couldn't be that.

[Josh Clark]

Sorry, I have to correct myself before all of the Scrabble players email in. It couldn't be Zippy the Pinhead because Zippy the pinhead would be a proper noun.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ah, okay, good point.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks.

[Chuck Bryant]

You can't use proper nouns.

[Josh Clark]

No, you can't.

[Chuck Bryant]

Might as well go ahead and say.

[Josh Clark]

That they're really serious about that stuff too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I bet. See I'm a house rules guy, so I can, you know, as long as everyone's on board, I think you can. You can have your own house rules for stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I agree.

[Chuck Bryant]

Don't bring that into a tournament.

[Josh Clark]

No. Get that mess out of here is what they'll tell you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but like, if I were to play with Ruby, she'd. And I'd probably say, like, hey, we can use proper nouns because she'll want to put our dog's name or something. Or maybe I would.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I did look up the highest scoring. Bingo. And that is musjiks. M, U, Z, J, I, K, S, which is a Russian peasant.

[Josh Clark]

Wow. Well, that was probably.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's probably mujeeks or something.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I like it both ways, though. Musjiks. Look at all them muschics toiling in the field.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I like that.

[Josh Clark]

So I was confused because there's a lot of, like. One of the rules is no proper nouns. No words that end in apostrophe or require an apostrophe. Yeah. And then also no foreign words. But clearly some foreign words are allowed in because they're so common in English that they've just basically been adopted into the language. I get that. But a musjix is not a common word in English, so it must mean that that does appear in some English dictionary somewhere, because that's kind of the great ruler arbiter. But I just don't see how it could be. That's just weird to me.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, what's weird is your college band, I know for a fact, was Jay Clark and the Muschicks.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, but we were trying to be exotic, you know, and we should also.

[Chuck Bryant]

Say that Scrabble, I think, is now up to 30 languages all over the world. And apparently that can be problematic. Like in France, you can add an E and an S to many, many words, so it can kind of get out of hand with the score totals there and our beloved Germany. And I never really thought about this, but German words are long, so there's not a lot of. I mean, sure, there are obviously words shorter than seven words in Germany, but a lot less than a lot of other languages.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's true.

[Chuck Bryant]

So it must just be Bingo City or whatever Bingo city is in Germany.

[Josh Clark]

There's also bingo. I don't know what city. Bingo bird, Stadt, maybe Bingo stock. Sure, there's a. So in some other countries, too, in foreign language versions of Scrabble, there are some adjustments with the tiles. Like, some have more than 100 tiles.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, right. Because of weird little letters.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. There's like double L and double R in the Spanish language version. There's also the N with the tilde over it. That's also a tile.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Spice it up a little.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think that's worth eight points.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but you have to remember that that's eight points. You have to say nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Should we take a break? I like how this is headed.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back.

[iHeartRadio Announcer]

Wanna learn about a pterosaur in college? Pterodactyl. How to take a perfect boobin all about fractals, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, the Lizzie Border murders, and the Cannonball runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explode. Just chuck and jump. This is something you should know. Word up, Jerry.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we're back. And if you're going to talk about Scrabble, you got to talk about Alfred Mosher Butts, because he is the gentleman who invented this game. This is in 1938. He was an unemployed architect at the time and just into games. He's from Poughkeepsie. But I believe the game was actually invented. Actually, I know this for a fact in Jackson Heights, queens, because at 81st street and 35th Avenue, I believe is a Scrabble style street sign. I think it's 35th Avenue has below each of the letters is the little number value subscript, which is kind of just a little nice, fun, cute nod.

[Josh Clark]

Are you sure? It's just that that community in particular isn't big Scrabble fans?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I'm positive.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. So he. Did you say he was an unemployed architect?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, at the time. And he was just into gaming and wanted to invent a game that was part chance, part skill.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So he did not have a great success with it out of the gate. He initially tried to call it lexico and crisscross words. And he took it around to game manufacturers and they're like, nah, I'm not really feeling this. And that was the way it went for a good decade before a man named James Bruno bought the rights. He saw something in it that I guess other people didn't. He renamed it Scrabble. He changed the gameplay a little bit. One of the biggest changes he made was that the way that Mosher Butz had come up with is that you just thought the word in like a kind of a mental version of the board. And the other player hopefully was able to pick up on the word you were thinking. And so Bruno was like, maybe we should just replace with an actual board and tiles. And that really kind of helped move things along a bunch.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You know, I looked up this James Bruno, and, you know, we get a lot of great information a lot of times from New York Times obituaries. And he was a friend of Butts, and so they used to play Scrabble together on occasion, like their homemade version. And once this guy took it over, he and his wife Helen, like, operated out of their house. And he was like, at a certain point, like, all that was in our house was boxes of tiles and racks and boards, and we couldn't move around. So they had to. They moved to an abandoned schoolhouse and then eventually a converted woodworking shop. And they had 35 employees working two shifts, producing 6,000 Scrabble sets a week by 53. By 1953.

[Josh Clark]

So within five years of him buying the rights?

[Chuck Bryant]

That is correct, sir.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so the year before that, I've seen it told as a legend or a widely told story. Laura put it. I don't know why no one's like, yeah, that's what happened. But supposedly the president of Macy's came across the. The game, I'm not sure how played it, liked it, ordered a bunch to stock up. Of course, that meant gimbals immediately followed suit. And so the. The game took off from there. So this would have been 1952 when that supposedly happened.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And Bruno was like, we can't possibly keep up with this demand. Like, this is just skyrocketed, which is great. But they turned to a company, a game maker called Celcho and Rider. And they took over making the game. And they did so for decades. They were the people who made Scrabble for a really long time. And within two years, two years of that great Macy's president story happening, four and a half million copies were sold. Like it just hit America like, you know, a giant packet of Pop Rocks and Diet Coke. Fermentous.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or like a T o n n e of bricks, which is worth more than ton.

[Josh Clark]

Nice joke.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that's selling pretty good. I think they've sold. They estimate about 150 million total sets as of, you know, kind of now, even though it's hard to get a real firm number on that. But they bought that trademark. Celcho and Ryder, I want to say Richter there, but it is. Ryder bought that trademark from them in 72. Bruno got a million and a half bucks, which would be about 12 million today. And this, by the way, was like he was looking for something to do in retirement. So. Wow, he really scored. That's a triple letter retirement gig, I would say, right? Or triple word even. And then the inventor, Mr. Butts, got 265 grand, which would be about 2 million bucks. Plus he got a very small royalty that he seemed to be pretty happy with. Yeah, he sounds like a great guy.

[Josh Clark]

This is one of the more heartwarming quotes I've come across in a while. He agreed. He was interviewed in 1984 about his invention, and he said, people are always asking me if I'm rich. I used to get 2 to 3 cents for each game sold. One third went to taxes. I gave one third away, and the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great.

[Josh Clark]

And if there's such thing as heaven, I believe that Mr. Butts is there right now.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so, too. He would have been in his 80s then, too, because I think he died in the early 90s. In his 90s.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Well, there you go. He had a great life, apparently.

[Chuck Bryant]

I love it.

[Josh Clark]

So things turned kind of dark when the Cabbage Patch Kids bought Xelcho and Ryder in 1986.

[Chuck Bryant]

You want to hear something funny?

[Josh Clark]

What?

[Chuck Bryant]

Every time I looked at that word, I said colco.

[Josh Clark]

Oh.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I was like. I was like, that's so weird. Like, I grew up with Coleco Toys.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I just kept seeing it as Colco. And I was like, wait a minute, dummy. It's Coleco.

[Josh Clark]

Well, you must be Scrabbleist, because that would just be like the word construct without any of meaning to it. So you're in there, Chuck. You really did some method research.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, maybe so.

[Josh Clark]

So Coleco. Yes. Bought Celcho and Ryder and just did not really give much of a care about Scrabble. I mean, it was just a money maker to them. Apparently, they were already in trouble, which is nuts, that they declared bankruptcy by 1989, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I can't remember. Surely we talked about in our Cabbage Patch Kids episode why that happened. But to go from having one of the hottest toys in the history of toys to bankrupt in the same decade is breathtaking as far as business goes. But when Coleco declared bankruptcy, Hasbro stepped in, and they did seem to care a lot more about Scrabble. And so, under their ownership, I think it's still owned by Hasbro, if I'm not mistaken. It's been fine. It's had its ups and downs, as we'll see. But there was also a bidding war for the international rights to produce Scrabble, and Mattel beat them out for that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And that I can't imagine what a plum that is. But it also occurred to me, and I know we've done an episode on intellectual property, but there's like, there's some fictitious right out there that says this one company is allowed to produce all the games just internationally. This other company has this other fictitious right to produce all the games just inside of the United States. And it's just so mind blowing to me that we've just kind of created that, that kind of made up structure for things and how much just gobs of money that legal fiction creates for people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Are you pushing for just an open source world?

[Josh Clark]

No, not necessarily. I don't have a problem with it. I was more just astounded by it, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, I mean, have you ever dug into like TV rights for professional sports leagues?

[Josh Clark]

Oh my God. Is that. I'll bet that's quite a jungle.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it is. And it's gotten really, really expensive. Like when you see the numbers, like, you know, Amazon acquires the right to air whatever, Sunday Night Football or something.

[Josh Clark]

It'S just like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Astounding what kind of money we're talking about, for sure. Anyway, I guess we can move on to competitive Scrabble because you know, a lot of people just play for funsies at home. I know our bud John Hodgman and his lovely wife Catherine play like for decades now. Cause they're high school sweethearts. So they're long, long, long term Scrabblers, you know, against each other. I kind of wanted to find out if there was a lifetime record that they keep up with, surely. But then I just decided not to ask.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, Hodgman used to live tweet their games.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, he did?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It was really cute to just kind of follow along.

[Chuck Bryant]

I bet they're both good because Katherine's an English teacher and John is, you know, knows a lot of words.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Anybody who knows Hodgman too, right. When they saw the Scrabble episode of Stuff youf Should Know knew that there was 100% Ch. Hodgman was gonna come up at some point in time.

[Chuck Bryant]

For sure he would've complained if we hadn't.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. He's a Scrabble Scrabble guy, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he would smoke me. In fact, I feel like I might have played him once on one of these trips that I used to do with him for maximum fun. But I don't know if we did play, it was not even competitive at all.

[Josh Clark]

I'm sure he was.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't see why he would've played. I don't see why he would have played me because I'm really just, you know, I'm like Steve Carell in Anchorman. I'll try to spell lamp just cause I looked at one, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, man, if it gets you some points, who cares?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, you and I probably be pretty good, you know, Matchup.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think so too. We should play sometime.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Okay, so that sounded unenthusiastic. I meant hell yeah, buddy.

[Josh Clark]

All right. Sorry you can't see me, but I'm raising the roof right now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Josh Clark]

So you mentioned competitive Scrabble, that there are tournaments, which isn't very surprising. I mean, people are into Scrabble, so when you start throwing money down for, for like prize money for tournaments, people are going to flock to them. And for years, the main. The biggest Scrabble tournament, what they called Nationals, was the North American Invitational Scrabble Players Tournament, which had its inaugural championship in 1978 and was held every year through to 2009. And Selcho and Ryder actually formed the National Scrabble association, which was very smart because that kind of thing generates a lot of interest, enthusiasm, newspapers cover. Oh, it's so crazy. There's a Scrabble championship right now. And like, it just helps keep the thing topical, you know, instead of just letting people buy it and crossing your fingers, that kind of thing. It was a pretty smart business venture. And then, like I said, Coleco came along. They did nothing for it. Apparently, the Players association had to shame Coleco into chipping in $5,000 for prize money for the national tournament. And then when Hasbro came along, they started funding it a lot more lavishly. But then they kind of said, you know, this isn't actually worth it anymore. You guys are, you know, maybe a few hundred people coming to these tournaments and you all have all of the Scrabble boards that you're ever going to need. You're not going to buy any more. So they stopped funding those and they actually shut down the National Scrabble Association. So an independent version came up, the North American Scrabble Players Association, I think back in 2009 is when it was formed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, and before anyone writes in, technically, they didn't completely shut down the nsa. They just stopped their. They weren't in charge of the tournaments anymore. They just. They moved them over to another program called School Scrabble.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. Because those kids have a long life of buying Scrabble boards ahead of them.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. You mentioned ups and downs over the years. You know, I guess all board games go through kind of boom periods and bust periods, or at least low periods. And Scrabble is no different. There was an early 2000s boom. There were televised tournaments. It's interesting what drives this stuff. I don't know if they know on the inside, but I couldn't figure out why it would have had a boom in the 2000s. Early 2000s.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, a documentary called Word Freaks, I believe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, is that what did it?

[Josh Clark]

It introduced it to a whole new generation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

Well, there you have it. Yeah. And it took off like, like Hasbro has a lot to be thankful for from that documentary, from what I understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I bet the New York Times crossword documentary to kick that up a notch.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. That was a great one.

[Chuck Bryant]

But we're not talking crosswords again, so don't worry.

[Josh Clark]

I just busted out in sweat.

[Chuck Bryant]

You got a flop sweat happening. There were 75,000 rated Scrabble tournament games in 2004. And that number by 2019 was cut almost in half. That went down to 40,000. And the Nationals went from 837 players to 280 over that same span. So it just seems like that documentary really caused a resurgence, I guess, and then it kind of went back to level set maybe.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. There was also a lot of internal strife too. The North American Scrabble Players association didn't make a lot of friends. They established a real top down hierarchy of how that that association was run. So some other players associations were developed, splintered off. There was a lot of fracture, I guess, in the Scrabble community that just kind of came around that time. That surely affected attracting new people. Like, I hate to use the word toxic because I feel like it's definitely overused, but it feels like that community got a lot more toxic around that time. And you know, that doesn't exactly attract people like, hey, I want to join that toxic subculture. Really mix it up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, well, some people are into that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Those aren't the people you want to attract to your toxic subculture, though.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or play Scrabble with.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

If you're in a tournament, you're going to see some big scores. They have, you know, scores over 800 points at times in tournaments. The highest scoring legal word. I don't think it's ever been played officially, but that would be a 1784 point score if that was across three different triple word scores. That word is oxyfen. Butazone.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's a now banned nsaid pain reliever.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And since I know you looked it up, because I did too, I'll let you give the definition of kazique, which is the highest score ever for a word played in a tournament. 392 points for Kazique.

[Josh Clark]

So yeah, so that one, from what I could tell, I found that as a Spanish word for an indigenous chieftain, usually among Caribbean tribes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I saw that the Taino people like the indigenous Bahamians.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And that was actually played.

[Chuck Bryant]

Amazing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean that's. So that's one word for 392 points. To put that into perspective, a good, you know, average person's Scrabble score, from what I can tell, couple to a few hundred points. This is like a Scrabble score with just a high Scrabble score with just one. One word. This is like the level that these people are playing at. And Chuck, I, I say we take another break and we'll come back and we'll poke around in the brains of those high level Scrabble players and see what neurologists have found out recently.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's do it.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Explode.

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Just chug and judge. That's stuff you should know. Word of up, Jerry.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, Chuck, so we've kind of made mention a couple of times that people who play Scrabble like think of words differently than normies do. And there have been studies using the Wonder machine, in particular by neurologists of the brains of people who play Scrabble because there's a lot of long standing discussions, rival theories and hypotheses about how we process words and information associated with words. And by studying Scrabble players, like high level Scrabble players, they found that their brains literally work different when it comes to words.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, take it away.

[Josh Clark]

Well, one of the studies, I can't remember what year it was, I actually failed to look, now that I think about it, they found that when you put the, put a Scrabble player through what's called the lexical decision task, which is showing people very quickly jumbles of words and saying, is there a word in there too late? Is there a word in here too late? They have to answer really quick. And there's always some lab assistant shouting too late. And really Just mix things up a little bit. Scrabble players use regions of their brains that most people wouldn't use. And they don't use regions of their brains that people normally do use. Say. So like when you think of a word, you think of the meaning. Usually that's how you grasp a word. When you're really kind of processing what the word is. There's a meaning attached to it. There's a symbolism attached to it. With the Scrabble player, they do not think like that. They think of words as physical constructs of letters. There's no meanings aren't attached to them. That takes too long. They process them much more quickly because it's just a bunch of letters that you put together. It doesn't matter what it means. It just matters that you can get this number of points on a Scrabble board. And one of the other things they found is that they also use more spatial reasoning than the average person does when they're recognizing and processing words and letters because they have to figure out how to orient them on the board and how they would intersect with other words on the board. So their brains change and the way they approach words change the more Scrabble you play.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think it's almost like Tetris, like in their brains at a certain point, like they might as well just be Tetris blocks that are trying to fit in. Obviously not Tetris because you can't make your own size and shaped things. But you know what I mean.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, I know what you mean. I think it's a good analogy.

[Chuck Bryant]

There's some other cool studies that are kind of findings they found from different studies. The setup of this one is basically that if you have a college degree, they have found that you're less likely than those without with less education to get age related memory loss and Alzheimer's. But in terms of Scrabble, they found that that gap can be closed a lot. If you don't have that college degree and you play a lot of Scrabble, you can close that gap to where it's almost the same as people with higher levels of education as far as acquiring that memory loss and Alzheimer's.

[Josh Clark]

Pretty great. Take that, college boy.

[Chuck Bryant]

What about the Russkies? That was interesting too, I thought.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they studied Russian engineering students. And by they, I mean the people who conducted this study. And they said here, Russian engineering students, we're going to teach you Scrabble and you're going to play it for a year and then we're going to test you we're going to have you play teachers who teach English as a foreign language. So they're Russian, but they know a lot of English. And we're going to play the English language Scrabble, by the way. So there's all the pieces on the board right there. And what they found is that the engineering students who didn't speak that much English were able to, I think, in the words of the study, smoke the English as a foreign language teachers in Scrabble.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's incredible.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Even though the teachers knew more English than the engineering students did.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. That's super cool. They've also found that for tournament play, men dominate tournament Scrabble tournaments, generally speaking, but they've done studies of this, and they're like, hey, it's not because men have big brains and women have little tiny brains. It's not because guys can learn words better than women. Has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with the fact that, in general, overall, men start younger than women do. Boys, I guess, start younger than girls when it comes to Scrabble, and women generally and girls play more Scrabble. But they say that's not necessarily how to get better at Scrabble. They're playing for fun and just having a good time. Whereas to get better at Scrabble, what these boys and men seem to be doing more of is, like, anagramming stuff and analyzing everything. And instead of just like, hey, let's just play some Scrabble and have some fun. Like, let me research and analyze this stuff so I can dominate in a tournament.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. But, I mean, that's how you get better at. Apparently, anagram is a huge thing to do if you want to get better at Scrabble, because when you look at the, you know, there's seven tiles on your tile holder. It's just a jumble of letters, and you have to find the words in those letters. That's part of the game. So if you go practice that. Yeah, you're gonna get a lot better. But I saw that among just the population in general, just people who play Scrabble for fun, it's much more closely divided. It's more like 60, 40 men to women.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's changed a lot over the past couple of decades, too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I think that documentary probably helped quite a bit.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. When it comes to, like, all right, what words, like, what dictionary do you use? There is a Scrabble dictionary. It's called the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. It was released in 1970. Eight Again by Selchow and Ryder, even though they worked with Merriam Webster to produce the game, because, you know, they're dictionary people. And this has caused a lot of controversy over the years because words have been added, words have been taken away. And every time that happens, the Scrabble community, you know, some people are like, great, Great. Change. And some people are like, no, I hate that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because to them, they're just words. The meaning has no purpose or point whatsoever in the game. It doesn't matter. So why would you take any words out that we could potentially use and score with?

[Chuck Bryant]

Some of the worst and the worst racial slurs out there have been in the Scrabble dictionary.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Do you want to tell some people?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, I'm not gonna say those, but there is a list. I think there was a woman named Judith grad in the 90s who kind of got on her. I don't want to say got on her soapbox because that indicates a bad thing. She got a campaign going to have the slurs removed. The Anti Defamation League got involved. Hasbro eventually said, all right, we're gonna remove these words from the next edition of the dictionary. Booby, gringo, farted, honky, whities, pissed, fatso, redneck, and wazoo.

[Josh Clark]

And Jerry, best of luck beeping all those out.

[Chuck Bryant]

It should be pretty easy.

[Josh Clark]

So, yeah, so there were a lot of Skywalker players who were like, this is outrageous. Who cares about offensiveness? And other people are like, this is kind of society evolving in real time right here. So I guess Hasbro made a compromise, and they said, well, how about this for tournament level? We'll keep the original. We won't take these words out. We'll have a separate book called the Official Word List among players. It's called TWL98. That's when it came out, is 1998. But for everybody else. And by the way, the TWL 1990 or 98 is just available to Players association members. So it's not, like, available to the general public. And then the other one, the toned down version, that's the one that the public will be able to get their hands on. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that was in the early 2000s. And then in 2020, the official tournament removed a lot of those slurs that they previously allowed for tournament play.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I also mentioned, you know, adding words. Over the past few years, they've added hundreds of words. Jedi subtweet vax have been added. Biria, as in birria tacos has been added.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, and I discovered A new dish from this TSO Chuck Kakumber, usually spelled with a K, but apparently it's also okay to spell with a C. It's an Indian dish featuring cucumbers. Oh, it's like a fresh tomato cucumber salad. And actually, I should correct myself. I think it could be Indian. But it's also possibly like anatolian. I'm not 100% sure, but it sounds delish. I'll send you the recipe.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, do it. They also add slang from time to time. Apparently ima I M M A as in I'm going to like, I'm about to do something. And also you can play that.

[Josh Clark]

But it's also possibly like anatolian. I'm not 100% sure, but it sounds delish. I'll send you the recipe.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, do it. They also had slang from time to time, apparently ima Imma, as in I'm going to like I'm about to do something. Then also you can play that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you could. You could also play yeet. Which.

[Chuck Bryant]

What is that?

[Josh Clark]

I don't know, man. You know, I really feel like I've outed myself in the last couple episodes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Skibidi Toilet buddy.

[Josh Clark]

Not the edgelord that people assume that I am.

[Chuck Bryant]

Edgelord. There has been some cheating over the years. We'll talk about a couple of these incidences incidents. In 2011, there was a world Scrabble championship between a Thai player named Cholapat Etre and a British guy named Ed Martin because it was a missing G tile. And there's a lot of versions of this story. Apparently Time magazine and some Scrabble website say that Etre called for Martin to be strip searched for that G. And the tournament officials were like, no, we're not gonna do that. We don't want to see that in mental floss. They said that, you know, they asked them to turn their pockets inside out and that eventually just escalated to like, hey, maybe they hit it in their pants. They should be strip searched.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe it's in their chode.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That'S why you strip search.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Is that. Is that in the Scrabble dictionary?

[Josh Clark]

There's no way that it's not. As a matter of fact, you keep talking, you tell the story, and I'm going to look it up.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then what they eventually found out was that the missing G was in the pocket of another player from a previous game. And what I want to know is like, who's running these tournaments? Like, how are you not counting the letters before the game or cracking open A brand new Scrabble factory. Sealed Scrabble. Like, you got to count those letters. You got to make sure that's like playing chess without, like a pawn and just being like, looks good to me.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's nuts. It's also nuts just how. How many players do cheat in like, high level tournaments.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like that kid.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, there was a kid. He was 13. So he's unnamed what blank tiles are good for, but they, they can stand. They're like a wild card. They stand in for any letter that you want.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So they can really come in handy when you have like a bunch of letters but you just can't quite connect them. That blank tile comes in there and you say, thanks, blank tile. So if you have that, you have a huge advantage. So finally, this kid was caught cheating. But this was on the heels of a year before when he won the $2,000 prize for winning. Even though apparently, statistically, the percentage of blank tiles that he came up with across the game or the games that he played throughout that tournament where it just doesn't add up, but they let that win stand. But for 2012, he got booted.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they should have made that kid pay that money back with interest.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they should have. Like, the Players association president would make a point of escorting women who went up to Kenimathy's hotel room to pick up equipment that they bought from her or were buying from him. Like, you just didn't go alone. Like it was an open secret. And then finally, like, he just groped the wrong woman. Me too, came along and I think at least 15 named women came forward and put their story on the record about him. And the, the response from the Players association was essentially like, okay, don't do it again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And he had already been banned for cheating. He palm tiles, too. He was a national champion. He palm tiles too. He got suspended for four years for cheating, but for the allegations of sexual misconduct, nothing. Just a warning, essentially. So that really ticked off a lot of people, especially high level women players too, who were like, you know what? We, we hold our own tournaments and he's not invited any longer, so he's kind of been ostracized. But I have the impression that he's.

[Chuck Bryant]

Still very much around, still making those, those custom racks.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. From what I can tell, by the.

[Chuck Bryant]

Way, live update, we did text John Hodgman just to find out. I was kind of curious about a couple of things about his highest Scrabble total ever. And if he and Catherine have a running record between them. And he says we have old notebooks full of score sheets, but we never go back and look at them. Because as we know, John Hodgman only looks forward. Time does not go backward.

[Josh Clark]

No, nostalgia is a toxic impulse, according to Hodgman.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. We were both consistently in the 300 to 350. Pretty good mode. Okay, that sounds high to me.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, same here.

[Chuck Bryant]

He said, that's good enough to make me happy. He said, we have Both probably broken 400 a couple of times. I remember words better than scores. 25 years ago, I added S T E R to joke to make jokester on a triple word square while playing with some friends of my parents. And I don't remember the points, but I was really proud of myself.

[Josh Clark]

I'll bet. I'll bet every once in a while you can peek in on Hodgman sleeping. And he's got a big smile on his face. Cause he's dreaming about that.

[Chuck Bryant]

I love it.

[Josh Clark]

I have a live update as well. Chode is not in the Scrabble.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

Allowable word.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the show. Live updates.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And Scrabble being the arbiter of what words we can and can't use now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly.

[Josh Clark]

So Scrabble, of course, has popped up in pop culture here or there. Rosemary's Baby very famously used. Mia Farrow used. Well, Rosemary uses Scrabble, a bunch of Scrabble tiles to try to figure out that some suspected witches were actually witches by using the tiles to figure out anagrams. Yeah, same with sneakers. I couldn't find that. That I saw that movie. I never saw the movie. And I couldn't find the clip with the Scrabble. I just saw mention of it in a couple of places.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't remember Scrabble. It was a long time ago. I love this one, Frank. Oh, Frank. The chairman of the board, Mr. Sinatra, in his version of the Twelve Days of Christmas, added nine games of Scrabble.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which is actually Joe Piscopo doing Frank.

[Josh Clark]

Do you know Seinfeld's mom played Quoan? Q, U, O, N, E. And like, Seinfeld calls her out on it, and it's not actually a word, but Kramer's like, yeah, Quoan, whatever. But the biggest thing that stood out to me in this scene, I watched it today, had the original dad, which did not work.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And then they brought in. I can't remember his name, but he was the dad in Arthur.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, was he the dad in Arthur?

[Chuck Bryant]

He was Liza Minnelli's father in Arthur.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he was Morty Seinfeld.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally.

[Josh Clark]

His first name's Barney, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, God, I used to know his name. Cause Arthur's, you know, one of my top ever comedies.

[Josh Clark]

And then Calvin and Hobbs. I think Calvin played ZQFMGB and said it was a type of worms from New Guinea.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's funny.

[Josh Clark]

And then lastly, Chuck, we can't forget Scrabble led to Trivial Pursuit being created. Because remember, they went and got a new Scrabble board, and we're like, how many Scrabble boards have we bought over the years? We should make our own game.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And that's it. Scrabble has not appeared in any other part of pop culture except for those things, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, sir.

[Josh Clark]

All right, well, that's Scrabble, everybody. Thank you for finally doing it, Chuck. And since I thank Chuck for finally relenting and giving in on doing an episode I've wanted to do for years and years and years, it's time for listener, ma'am.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, you. Hi, guys. Or basically just the voices that live in my head permanently, because I listen to you two all the time.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

A while back, I have no idea where the idea came from. I wonder whether everyone sees concepts the same way in their head as I do. And started asking around because she's referencing the Inner Dialogue app, where people don't hear words, they see images. And Daisy says this, and this is very interesting. I think I noticed that for me, the calendar months of the year in my brain are arranged like this. January, February, March, April, May, June, July, December, November, October, August. Well, on the line below, like, it's very important, the way it's spaced out, I think. And it's not. It's also indented. So December, November, October, August is on the line below, indented to about mid February. So going from left to right and then making a curve to continue from right to left. No need to point out how weird this is, guys, because no calendar ever was drawn this way. However, this is how it is normal for me in my head. You can imagine the weird faces I got when asking this question enthusiastically to find out about other people's head calendars, especially when I told them about mine. Anyway, all this to ask, when you picture a yearly calendar in your head, what does it look like? Immediately when I read that, the only thing that popped into my head was a like the back of a wall calendar you would get as a teenager where it had all of them listed. That's what I picture.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, nice. So what are the monthly centerfolds of.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or the pictures of? I don't know, but I guess it would just be 4, 4 and 4.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's how I picture it in my head. January, February, March, April and then four more. Then four more in order. Because I'm not weird.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. I'm trying to come up with it now. And I don't really think I keep a calendar in my head. I'm just too, like in the present, you know, like in the now. Yeah, baby, sorry to let you down. Who is that?

[Chuck Bryant]

That is Daisy and Daisy is from Belgium.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks, Daisy.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's the problem with that.

[Josh Clark]

She's from belt. There's your problem. Thanks a lot, Daisy. That was wonderful. I feel like also that somebody could make a T shirt of like a, like the visual representation of the calendar in Daisy's head and it would be the most arcane, deep cut stuff you should know T shirt of all time. Totally. Yeah. So if you want to get in touch with us like Daisy did and share your mental whatever we would love, you can send us an email to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

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