I came to Twiggs looking for coffee and concentration.
And I found cwm.
Cwm, I've just learned, is a Welsh word for a small valley, according to The Scrabble Dictionary.
I've just played Scrabble, twice, you see, with the Twiggs Thursday Night Scrabble Crew.
Tomorrow being Thanksgiving, they moved their meeting a day early. As I typed on my trusty laptop and tried to come up with the right place to position a certain paragraph in the chapter I'm working on, I kept glancing to my right, and listening, wondering -- were they friends? roommates? a club?And then, an hour into their gaming, my eavesdropping paid off --
"So you're off?" I heard someone say.
"Yeah, I'm done for the night."
Before they started their next game, I leaned over and asked, "Are you looking for a player?"
They immediately welcomed me. The first round I got trounced, but the second I managed to keep up, scoring big with "andiron" (50 points for using all your letters -- my first ever!).
These people played on a completely different level. One man talked about this personal best -- over 900 points.
"Nice, " another commented when the woman sitting across from me aligned the valuable f and k in "freaky" with high scoring squares.
That's how I learned that pa and mo and el and yean and toea are words. (Don't ask me what them mean -- or those players either.) I was also told that the best online Scrabble dictionary and the official pentalingual Internet Scrabble Club are hosted in Romania, and that this group meets on Thursdays as an offshoot of a different, monthly, club.
Gained: A scrabblously good time.
