This is just not okay!
Bronx Scrabble savant Joel Sherman has started a war over words, campaigning against the inclusion of “OK” on the game’s official list.
Sherman wants to stop the North American Scrabble Players Association — the governing body for official competitions — from making what he calls an “insanely horrendous error in judgment.”
Sherman, 56, is no armchair Scrabble enthusiast. He is the reigning North American champion and a former world champ.
While casual players rejoiced in September when Merriam-Webster included OK in the sixth edition of “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary,” adding a valuable two-letter word to their arsenals, Sherman saw it as an affront.
According to the game’s rules, only words that appear as a lower-case entry in a source dictionary and are not abbreviations are allowed. Sherman, who has been playing Scrabble since he was 5, is a purist.
“It is my feeling that the only way you could find citations for OK without periods between the letters and in lower case is from people typing quickly and conveniently in text messages and on the Internet,” he said. “This form of printing that word would be rejected by professional editors in published material.”
Sherman, who is known as GI Joel because he suffers from a gastrointestinal ailment, once scored a record-breaking 803 points in a tournament game — his average score is 418 points — and was featured in the 2004 documentary “Word Wars.” He uses a computer program to continue to learn new words.
His North American championship victory in August was a come-from-behind win that netted him a $10,000 prize.
Sherman posted a poll on the Facebook page of the North American Scrabble Players Association to gather ammunition in the fight against OK’s inclusion on the group’s word list, which is out in February. Sentiment was running 2-1 against OK as of Friday.
John Chew, the group’s co-president, rejects the idea that OK is an abbreviation.
“It’s just a word and it’s a short spelling of o-k-a-y (and) people use it all the time which is one more reason to let it be good in Scrabble,” Chew said.
OK will join the two-letter ew and the most-requested zen, he said.
The two-letter words are prized because they provide bridges to higher scoring plays.
Sherman says he has no beef with okay itself.
“I use it all the time,” he said. “But it’s spelled O-K-A-Y. That’s a word.”