You sunk my Scrabbleship!

So it's come to this.

Language elitists have been complaining about the decline of English for a very long time now. First it was computers and Internet shorthand (LOL!)--all these abbreviations and replacing letters with numb3r5 4 no apparent reason! Not to mention colons and hypens and brackets being used to make emoticons, completely ignoring the rules of grammar!

Somehow, English survived the advent of the Internet. But a new threat lurked around the corner--text messages. Not only was texting harder on the fingers than typing, thus leading to more use of Internet-pioneered abbreviations to alleviate thumb fatigue, but the 140-character limits on message length practically necessitated English butchering.

Still, somehow, English persevered. Even as Twitter took the 140-character limit to those who didn't have cell phones, and as spell check dictionaries became larger and better able to distinguish between typos and spelling mistakes, English survived.

No matter what, the purists argued, there were some things for which proper English would never go out of style. Newspapers and academic papers would need to remain as universally understandable as possible. The business world would retain linguistic conventions in order to give the illusion of professionalism. And if all else failed, there was still Scrabble.

Scrabble was possibly the best tool English purists could wield. Everybody seems to have a bit of a weakness for the game, and thus unlike Apples To Apples or Monopoly, the official rules would always prevail. No abbreviations, no foreign words, no proper nouns. Unless you wanted to embarrass yourself, you had to know what those things were.

Now that proper nouns are being allowed, the distinctions are growing ever shorter. Suddenly we don't have nouns and verbs and adjectives and proper nouns, we just have words. (I'm as guilty as anybody, I love nouning verbs and verbing nouns.)

English was never a beautiful language, but at least we had proper nouns to help describe something unique. Their acceptance into Scrabble is just one more instance of English becoming even more complex and, from an analytical standpoint, a much worse language.

Let's all switch to Esperanto and play some Don't Wake Daddy.

(Oh, and as for the part about backwards words now being allowed, I'm just going to stick my fingers in my ears and pretend I never heard about it.)

--Ryan