Current feedback blocks player learning and improvement

The reincarnation in the digital world of this great old game hasn’t benefited its players as it might. One gets better at scrabble by learning new words. But the digital tutor in the game is useless in that regard. It’s no help at all when the tutor smugly says, “Not bad! But here’s how you could have made the best use of your rack,” and then deposits a string of gibberish on the board, with no definition.

I’ve got a pretty good vocabulary from my training in English literature and medicine, and I have too much respect for this language to accept as a word a string of letters with no discernible etymological pattern—a string that could have been typed by a chimpanzee for all I know. If the “tutor” function is to be useful for players to improve their skills, then any words in the tutor’s database have to include at least simple definitions, which the player can access with a command button.

Perhaps the whole dictionary issue needs to be reviewed. Our language has been open to the incorporation of new words from before the Norman Conquest. Not to accept a word such as “squaw”—used in English for centuries—is to erase a time in our history when English speakers were trying to make connections with whole civilizations of which they had not previously even dreamed. And It is infuriating when, say, a medical word of Latin or French origin, which has for years been used and continues in common usage among English and American medical speakers, is rejected as “not English.” I wonder what the tutor would do with “roux-en-y.” A lucky player with 2 blank tiles to use as hyphens should be allowed to play the word.

I’ve not heard of the “dictionaries” listed in the game’s introductory material. The only dictionary that should be used is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is constantly being updated.

Today’s game: it offers “cunit” as a “best word.” My online dictionary says there’s no definition for that word.

ERHmd
————————————
————————————
The following unsigned review was present on my screen when I went to “Scrabble” in the App Store to write my own review. I didn’t write the following review, and no one but I has access to this device. But I certainly endorse the writer’s complaint about the rejection of “squaw.”
ERHmd

“Revise the dictionary”

The PCU, vs. which I usually have been playing, has a weird idea of the English language. I laid down the letters for the word "squaw," which certainly entered our language early in the colonial period, only to have the word disqualified. Meanwhile the CPU put down the word "Flotel," which the keyboard resists and of whose meaning Im ignorant--Im imagining a smelly student hostel on a back street.

ERHmd about SCRABBLE Premium, v5.21.1