k is for krag

Last night Dan and I squared off in a cut throat game of Scrabble. Well okay, if it was cut throat, my game was the throat and Dan held the knife.

According to my job title, I'm a wordsmith. I am supposed to be good at this game. And maybe against anyone else, I might have held my own. But it's difficult to hang with someone whose average score was about 25 points a word. He was constantly throwing down words on double word scores that allowed him to collect points horizontally as well as vertically reaching into the 30-point echelon.

He failed to tell me beforehand, that when it comes to spelling, he is basically a prodigy. He also owns four different versions of this game. So I could write him off as a big dork, but I can't help being impressed.

Meanwhile, while I may have an uncanny ability to correct comma placement and weed out passive voice, I'm a terrible speller. Chris, one of my editors at work, takes endless delight in pointing out where synonyms of very different meaning than intended have slipped into my stories. There are times when it is so bad, it reaches levels of absurdity.

Last night, I attempted to spell crag, "krag." I misspelled the very first word I put down. I believe it was "goad." These are four-letter words, folks. This is what I'm talking about.

To be fair, there is more to this game than spelling. It does take some creativity too, which maybe I could work on.

Lesson learned: I had better get out the flash cards before I take on Dan in Scrabble again. Maybe they have openings in the fifth-grade spelling class at the local elementary school.