Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Er, Es, Et, Ex, Fa & Fe

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Er

A filler word used in speech, and a tricky word to research since Google wants to talk about the George Clooney vehicle ‘ER‘.  While we’re at it, we might as well bring forward…

Uh

…and…

Um

Since they fill the same role in our language, with mild flavor differences.  Also, ‘Er’ is preferred in the United Kingdom, while ‘Uh’ is preferred in the Americas, but that’s by no means a hard and fast rule.  ‘Um’ dates back to 1672, ‘Er’ was added to the dictionary in 1862 and ‘Uh’ hit common usage in 1960.  I probably have a few readers who were born during World War II.  Did you guys know that the word ‘Uh’ didn’t exist when you were a teenager?  How did you stumble through asking your puppy love crush, Loraine Baines, to go out with you to The Under the Sea Enchantment Dance?

Er, Uh and Um are riddled throughout modern English speakers sentences, but often not recorded when transcribed.  That means, before recording devices caught people in the act of speech disfluency, that words like ‘Er’, ‘Uh’ and ‘Um’ slowly morphed depending on the local dialect.  One look at the Filler (linguistics) page on Wikipedia should indicate how varied filler words are throughout the world.  I particularly like that someone pulled forward Ronald Reagan’s famous filler word “Well”.  It shows we don’t need hundreds of years of word morphing to create new filler word.  All it takes is for one well known person to favor a particular sound, and, jinkies, new filler.

Filler words are resilient buggers.  We try to remain vigilant on the Power to the Meeple Podcast and cut out what we can, but uhs and ums pour out our mouths despite our best intentions.  It’s frustrating.  People point to these words to mock how slow-witted a person is.  Good actors, newscasters and radio personalities avoid using them.  How can the daily news filter so many out?

Well, radio and television personalities are reading off of cue cards.  Filler words are used to buy time to think of what we’ll say next, but someone who’s memorized their lines doesn’t need time to invent their next sentence.  However, news stations do fill your ears with filler words when pundits are debating.  Here, filler is used to stave off commentary when you pause in your speach.  Some of the most obvious abusers of filler words (and often filler expressions) are politicians.  John F. Kennedy didn’t say “er argh um” between his sentences because it was funny (although it often is).  He was filling the void with noise so you’d continue to listen to him.  With repeated use, his filler words became part of his filler speech patterns.

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Es

See Ar.

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Photo taken by Kim Scarborough

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Et

Ate.  I kid you not.  Merriam-Webster’s got this one, though Oxford doesn’t.  Which is odd, since the word ‘Et’ appears to be based on a common British pronunciation of the word ‘ate’.  From what I’m digging up, ‘Et’ is losing favor in England since it’s a classist pronunciation, marking its user as posh.  I’ve also read that a number of Americans think ‘et’ is “Hillbilly talk”.  Maybe Hillbillies influenced Webster to keep the definition that Oxford balked at?  I don’t know.  I do think it funny, though, to imagine what the hours for ‘The Society for Keeping the Word ‘Et’ in our Dictionaries’ would be like.  Hillbillies sticking their bare feet on Georgian dinner sets, lighting corn cob pipes with hundred pound notes, while the cast from Downton Abbey regale them with a jug-tootin’ hoe down.

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Image created by !Fleet-Feet

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Ex

Former.  Most commonly, a former spouse.  And before you complain about the degeneration of the language, keep in mind that this word has been in the dictionary since 1827 .

1755 if you count the other two definitions for ‘Ex’ that aren’t used as often: ‘From, especially when talking about an animal born from another animal’.  So if I had a cow named Maggie, and it gave birth to a calf named Marigold, the calf would be ‘Marigold ex Maggie’.  Cows with titles.  Who knew?  The other definition is ‘without, especially when pertaining to securities’.  I’d explain further, but finance gives me the wigglies.

Oh, and yes, you can ‘see also Ar‘ for this word.  Four definitions.  The next time someone questions your use of the word ‘Ex’ in a Scrabble, put money on the table, and bet them that ‘Ex’ has at least four definitions in Webster.  That player will soon be a contender ex ante.

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Fa

See Do.

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Fe

A letter in the Hebrew alphabet.  Scrabble recognizes two other Hebrew letters, both…

He

…and…

Pe

He and Pe both appear in Webster (Oxford only includes ‘Aleph’ and ‘Beth’, the first two letters of the Hebrew language, before calling it a day and going out for a smoke), but Fe appears in neither dictionary.  I’ve called Scrabble out before, and claimed that if a word didn’t appear in either of those two dictionaries, then it shouldn’t be legal in Scrabble.  I was going to reverse my decision with this word, and say the Scrabble dictionary did a good job picking up Fe where Webster left it behind.  But the more I read… the trickier it got.

One problem is that ‘Fe’ isn’t one of the 22 traditional letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  It’s a variation off of ‘Pe’.  Roman script ‘F’ and ‘P’ are analogues for ‘Fe’ and ‘Pe’.  To English speakers, the two sounds are individuals.  But the Hebrew language treats the voiceless labiodental fricative and the voiceless bilabial plosive as variations, differentiated by a dot to let you know that one consonant has a slightly different sound.  Webster, meanwhile, isn’t interested in Hebrew phonics; it just wants to catch all 22 letters.

So Scrabble has one up on Webster, and included a variation on a Hebrew letter as a word.  That seems acceptable.  ‘Fe’ is a Hebrew word after all, and it is a Hebrew letter… just not a letter from the traditional 22 letter alphabet.  I don’t see a problem with Scrabble noticing a hole and seeking to fill it.  So I guess I don’t really have a problem with Scrabble.  I’ve got a completely different problem with Webster.  Why Hebrew?

I understand why the Merriam-Webster dictionary includes Greek script as English words (we’ll get to Pi later), since those symbols get a lot of use, especially in math and the sciences.  Hebrew, however, is a language spoken by aproximately 6 million speakers.  Cyrillic, by contrast, is used by 250 million people (mostly Russians, Slavs, and former soviet countries).   Arabic is the most common script after Roman, used by 380 million speakers.  I understand why our dictionaries would avoid Devanagiri, Bengali and Kanji scripts.  Those scripts have individual words for each syllable, bringing the total number of words added to the dictionary into the thousands.  But Cyrillic and Arabic would add 67 words to the dictionary.  It would be a pain to Scrabble players (Cyrillic would add nine new two-letter word combinations), but a boon to the public who don’t know that ‘that backwards letter-R thingy’ (Я) is called a ‘Ya’.

What’s the point of putting ‘Pe’ in the dictionary if we aren’t willing to add ‘Ve’ or ‘Kha”?  I’m tempted to blame racism, but I get the impression it’s more subversive than that.  I think our Judeo-Christian western culture simply ‘likes’ Hebrew more.  English is predominantly spoken in countries dominated by Christians.  But globalization in the past twenty years changed English from an important business language to the lingua franca of the world.  There are currently 1.8 billion people who can speak English, at least on a basic level.  That’s approximately one quarter of the world population, and the number is growing.  By contrast, 7% of the world population speaks English as their primary language.  That seven percent are responsible for maintaining the language, and adapting it.  If we choose to neglect the needs of the international community, then they will ignore us, and use our language for their own purposes, adapting and changing the language without our input.

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Are you a logophile eager to learn more?  Why don’t you head on over to the Scrabble’s Two Letter Words Page?