Etcetera #37: Phreakers, Hats, Scrabble

Dorothy Dunnett was a painter, musician, sailor, polyglot, and scholar of the 1600s (a century of great polymaths). She wrote: “Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable. You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular. You may be good at Greek and be good at sport, and be wildly popular. But try all three and you’re a mountebank. Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency.”

“Honey,” I said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just got off the phone with a guy who’s in charge of video game world records, and he said the world record for Game Boy Tetris is 327 lines, and he wants us to go to New Hampshire this spring so you can try to break the world record live in front of the judges at the world’s largest classic video game tournament.”

Of course you don’t really understand any given Really Long Book. You don’t – because no one truly can. These are not finished things, these are not self-contained things. There is no one single, clear and obvious thing that they are telling us. If nothing else, these things take so long for you to read them, that they worm their way completely into your life as you do so; you will be different every time that you approach them. If you ever think you’ve finished a Really Long Book, you have not understood it. If it contains any sense at all, then this sense is something that you will keep on returning to – revising, over and over again, throughout your life. At their best, these texts are every bit as opaque as the self. A true Really Long Book is something that you’re never done with.

To play the game well you needn’t learn the definitions, of course, and success in the competitive game of Scrabble has nothing to do with one’s everyday working vocabulary. Its best players tend not to be poets or English professors but, rather, computer programmers, mathematicians, musicians, and the otherwise technically inclined. These are the sort of people who can easily retain coded information and quickly turn it into ordered meaning. A number of the world’s best English-​language players come from Thailand and barely speak English. And recall that the world’s best English-​language player won the French-​language championship without speaking French.