Scrabble with a purely defensive player..

But you don’t need to have ‘quixotic’ in your vocabulary to be successful at Scrabble, you only need to know that it is a specific string of symbols that is legally playable. There are expert, world-class Scrabble players who don’t speak, write, or understand English–anyone would consider their (English) vocabularies to be beyond atrocious. So how can they be top-level Scrabble players? Because they know what strings of symbols are playable and they excel at the strategy of the game.

You see this phenomenon (to a lesser extent) even with native English-speakers. For example, it’s a given that knowing all the two letter plays is essential. But some of these “words”***** aren’t even English words at all (other than as personal nouns or abbreviations–neither of which is allowed in Scrabble) so even a highly-educated English-speaker’s vocabulary won’t help him in the world of competitive Scrabble.

*****Consider these legal Scrabble ‘words’: AB, AE, AR, BO, DE, MM, NE, OE, OM, PE

My all-time greatest Scrabble victory came when I was about 100 points shy of victory, on literally the last turn of the game, just as my ass of a roommate was preening and grinning, I managed to drop quixotic on double triple-words with the triple-leter on the X (plus a vertical or two). He was speechless.

What a quixotic story that is.