Inclusion of newfangled words - which have never been part of English - into the official reference for Scrabble players lays open the possibility of any random sequence of letters being sanctified as English. The move undermines the very language Scrabble is played in, and the implications are disheartening.
Scrabble is more than a game. Nearly four million games are sold around the world annually. Of these, parents encourage children to play Scrabble because it helps them learn or improve their English. Adults too play the game to refine their own language skills. Scrabble's success lies in making learning fun. But that educative function, so engaging to young and old alike, is being sacrificed. Some words included are not just slang, but also misspellings. Besides sowing confusion, this trend will lead to pointless duplication of perfectly adequate words. What's wrong with 'girl'? Why must there also be 'grrl'?
That Indian words like gobi and aloo can also be used shouldn't be celebrated as a sign of our soft power. Rather, it signifies the undermining of the English language, which has perfectly good equivalents for the terms borrowed from us. Relying on Hindi words can make people not learn or use the English variants. That's counterproductive for Indians especially. The most productive sectors of our economy depend on our being able to speak English, and Scrabble is a good, fun way to hone our skills. Grammar too goes out in the expanded lexicon. Words like 'myspace' and 'wiki' are proper nouns, yet find a place in Scrabble. English is a means of communication between diverse peoples the world over. The more it's debased, stretched beyond recognition to include alien words, the less it will be able to serve this function.
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