§ 139. A log in the eye

Back when the author was still in school and had Ds in his Russian class, a designer told him that there could be some mistakes in a paper, but never on the cover—a misprint on the front page would mean losing a job.

For a designer who knows that his work will be read by thousands of people, careful attention to orthography is a must. An easy way to improve spelling is to play word games. So, let’s go shopping for Scrabble, the analogue to a Russian game called the Erudite.

In recent years many things have changed, and playing word games is no longer an intellectual pastime (if doing crosswords can be intellectual anyhow), which it used to be with the Erudite. Today, Scrabble represents a Monopoly-like flashy battle—it even has two fighting letter chips on the package.

Scrabble’s slogan is “Every word counts!” yet there is a misspelled word printed right there, on its very box.

“Crossoword game”

Every word has to count, of course, but not like that—in Scrabble additional o is worth only 1 point.