ACKEE and HACKEE

An ACKEE (also spelled AKEE) is a:

1. a sapindaceous tree, Blighia sapida, native to tropical Africa and cultivated in the Caribbean for its fruit, edible when cooked
2. the red pear-shaped fruit of this tree

 

 If you add an H to the beginning of it, you get HACKEE. Unlike ACKEe, HACKEE is not to be found at www.dictionary.com

Searching generally on the web, a HACKEE is someone who has been hacked, as opposed to a HACKER, who does the hacking.

 

 

Word building: ACHES and LACHES and TACHES

We all have our aches and pains.

But what are LACHES?

Laches is a noun, which means "failure to do something at the proper time, especially such delay as will bar a party from bringing a legal proceeding."

And TACHES?

We covered TACHE few days ago - it's a buckle or a clasp. TACHES is the plural.

How about DACE and TACE? Remember what they were?

DACE is a small freshwater fish, and TACE is a different spelling of the word TASSET, which is a piece of armor for the thighs.

 

Word-building: ACHED and BACHED

We all know that ACHED is the past-tense of ACHE.

Add a B to the front of ACHED and you get BACHED.

BACHED means "to live as a batchelor.

So we've got "to BACH",  "BACHING it", and "he BACHES".

A BACHELOR is an unmarried man.

Based on the pronunciation of BACHELOR, I've always assumed that BACH,  BACHING and BACHES are pronounced with a flat "a" sound and a "t" (so it sounds like "batch, batching, and batches).

What is MACHE again?

I'm going back through my notes and I remember TACE... it's TASSE or TASSET which is thigh armor.  And DACE is a kind of fish.

But what is MACHE again?  I'll have to look it up...

Wait for it..

Oh, yes, MACHE is a European herb.

Although I think I will find it easier if I try to remember that it is also unit of measurement:

MACHE (symbol ME from German Mache-Einheit, plural MACHES) is an obsolete unit of volumic radioactivity named for the Austrian physicist Heinrich Mache.It was defined as the quantity of radon (ignoring its daughters; in practice, mostly radon-222) per litre of air which ionises a sustained current of 0.001 esu (0.001 StatAmpere).

ACHE and MACHE and TACHE

We all have aches and pains, but when you put an M in front of ACHE you get MACHE.

MACHE is a European herb, and is pluralized MACHES.

Put a T in front of it and you get TACHE, which is a clasp or buckle, from Old French. It is pluralized TACHES.

ACE and DACE and TACE

Everyone knows what an ACE is - a pitching ACE, a low card in a card game (or a high card, depending on the game) and so on.

So what the heck is DACE and TACE?

A DACE, pluralized DACES, is a freshwater fish of the carp family.

A TACE, pluralized TACES, is a TASSE.

What is a TASSE, you ask?

A TASSE, pluralized TASSES, is a TASSET.

So what is a TASSET, you ask?

A TASSET, pluralized TASSETS, is a piece of plate armor for the upper thigh!

ABY and GABY

ABY means "to pay the penalty for" and is from Scotland. ABOUGHT, ABYING, and ABYS are its conjugations.

But guess what! It can also be spelled ABYE. Also ABYES.

Put a G at the beginning of ABY, and you get GABY.

A GABY is a dolt (also from Scotland). GABIES means more than one dolt.

ABOON and GABOON

To be ABOON is to be "above." It's an adjective from a "Scotch and British dialect."

If you add a G to the beginning of it, you get GABOON, which is "the soft, reddish-brown wood of an African tree" according to Dictionary.com, and a spittoon, according to The Dictionary. 

A SPITTOON, by the way, is a receptacle in which those folks who chew tobacco spit the juice.

They are both pluralized the same, with an S on the end, so GABOONS and SPITTOONS.

Word-building... ABED and SABED

I've been browsing through my Scrabble Word-Building Book, and came across "ABED" and "SABED."

By putting an "s" in front of ABED, (as in someone who is "in bed") , we get "SABED," which means "he savvied."

SABE, according to The Dictionary, is "to savvy," and is conjugated SABED, SABEING and SABES.

SABE is not to be found at dictionary.com.

Without having access to the makers of The DIctionary to ask what they were thinking, it's impossible to know why this is considered a useable word.

"Saber" is Spanish for "to know", and to the Word Detective at least, that's probably how SABE (pronounced sah-bay) came to be included.

http://www.word-detective.com/2012/02/sabe/

SAVVY is a favorite word of Captain Jack Sparrow, or at least it was in the original The Pirates of the Caribbean - the first and best in the series, in my opinion.

It is from the Spanish "saber" -  and has been used in English since the 1700s, according to Dictionary.com (which is why Captain Jack Sparrow would know and use the word).

SAVVY can be a verb, a noun or an adjective.

SAVVY, to understand, is conjugated SAVVIED, SAVVYING, SAVVIES.

One can also say something SAVVILY.

And a person can by SAVVY, SAVVIER, or the SAVVIEST of all.

Why learn the words you use?

I have to admit that nothing irks me more than browsing through the Official Scrabble Dictionary (which I will refer to as The Dictionary) and finding words that don't really belong.

Scrabble is supposed to be a game of English words and loan words.  "Loan" words are words that are in common usage throughout the US and England.

Here in the US we have a lot of loan words from Spanish. (AMIGO for friend, for example), and British English has a lot of loan words - or perhaps "loan spelling" would be a more accurate term - from Scotland (SAB for SOB for example). 

But CAHIER?

CAHIER is French for "notebook"...and the only people who use CAHIER on a regular basis are the 1,000 or so intellectual film buffs in the US and England who read the magazine CAHIERS du Cinema. No one else would know this word because it simply is not in common usage...so it does not belong in The Dictionary, in my opinion. If you're going to use CAHIER then why not use "cuaderno", which is Spanish for "notebook"?

I'd love to be a fly on the wall of these "Let's Add New Words to The Dictionary" meetings, just to find out their reasoning behind why some words are included and some words, which you would think would be included based on other words of a similar nature that are included, are not.

For example there are a few names of runes which are included in The Dictionary, and others aren't.  Why not? If you're going to include a handful of very-rarely-used words for certain runes, why not stuff that hand full with all the words for runes?

Why learn the words you use?

Having said all the above, it is interesting to go through The Dictionary and learn the meanings of all these words. That's one of the benefits of Scrabble - or should be - to improve your vocabulary, even if you're learning words that you'll never use in your life outside the Scrabble hall (which, as an aside, is why spelling bees annoy me. Test people on words that they need to know, not on words that they will never, ever ever use...)

I also think it's a lot easier to remember words if you know what they mean - and it's important to know what they mean if you want to be able to conjugate them or pluralize them.  (Can you put an S at the end of QUA?  Why no, you can't.)

So learning the word definitions makes sense.

Review: The Scrabble Word-Building Book

The subtitle for The Scrabble Word-Building Book (compiled by Saleem Ahmed) is "The Scrabble Player's Winning Edge!" (And note also that Scrabble should have a little trademark R symbol, but my blogging software doesn't seem to support that symbol).

This book is 705 pages long, and since it was revised and updated in 2007 (from its initial publishing date of 2001), it is a little bit out of date when you consider the 5,000 new words that were put into The Dictionary in August 2014.

But it is an excellent book for all that.

The book is divided into three sections - 2-letter words (missing the four new ones, PO (slang for toilet, TE (alternate spelling of TI, a musical note), DA (Welsh slang for father) and GI (a martial arts uniform), 3-letter words, and 4 letter words and onward.

For each letter (in the 2-letter section) and each 2-letters (in the three letter-word section), all the combinations of words are given.  (No definitions, mark you, just the words themselves.)

Starting with Section III: The Main List, the book starts once again with the letter A, and goes through and gives words that can be created by adding a letter to the beginning of a word or its end, if any.

For example, when you put a K in front of ABAKA (a Philipine plant,) you get KABAKA - a Ugandan ruler.

When you put a B in front of ABAS (two or more sleeveless garments worn by Arabs) you get BABAS, (two or more rum cakes).

A lot of the words simply add plurals, but at least half if not more have more than one word added on to them.

For example, RUB will yield DRUB, GRUB, RUBE, RUBS and RUBY.

SHOO will give SHOOK, SHOOL (to shovel), SHOON (a plural of shoe (presumably in Scotland!)), SHOOS and SHOOT.

It's a good book to browse through on a regular basis, therefore, to open up your thoughts to words that you can build off ones that are already on the board.

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