The Lion King | 43
B
ili Odum’s article on cycling
in one of the previous edi-
tions of LKM excited and
inspired me. It was a journey into
the personal adventure of a cy-
cling addict. He brought cycling
to life in his article and has made
me a lover of cycling. But there
is another sport I have always
loved. Scrabble.
Did I hear someone ask if Scrab-
ble is a sport?
For most people, a sport is only
when you exert physical energy.
For me, a sport is a competition
whether physical or not.
Scrabble is a game that not only
relaxes you, but sharpens your
word bank, builds your vocabu-
lary and pushes you to research
words. It is fun and at the same
time intellectually stimulating.
It is an easy way to build your
spelling and grammatical skills.
It can be played by two to four
people but you must have a
good dictionary as companion
or you may find yourself arguing
through the game about words.
I remember sometime ago, I was
playing scrabble with a friend,
we did not have a dictionary
handy so we both became mis-
chievous and started cooking up
all manner of ‘out of this world’
words, words like ‘tetingo’ ‘lok-
ard’, staek, ‘kichna’, ‘edlo’. We
both laughed and argued, each
claiming our words were right.
There was no dictionary to be an
independent judge.
Soon however, another friend
came along with a dictionary.
The outcome was obvious. Most
of the “imaginative words” had
no place in the dictionary.
The beauty of scrabble is that
you have just seven tiles to create
words. The tiles must form words
which, in crossword fashion, flow
left to right in rows or downwards
in columns. The words must be
defined in a standard dictionary
which provides a list of officially
permissible words.
It is interesting to have this handy
and portable game around you,
in your car and as a collector’s
item at home. It is a great way
to burn calories because as you
think hard to form an acceptable
word, you burn calories at a rate
similar to doing an activity that
requires physical exertion.
However, beyond the physical
benefit, like the game of glolf;
scrabble develops you and
makes you stand out amongst
your peers. You develop a store
house of words that helps you in
your writing and speaking.
Also scrabble unifies the family; I
use every available opportunity
to play scrabble with my wife.
My little girls often turn every-
thing upside down. It can be
frustrating, but it is amazing how
my four year old girl has started
putting three to four letter words
together. Of course we have to
take it slow with her as she has to
develop at her pace but chas-
ing my girls around, shouting ‘put
that back’ is a lot of activity and
helps me burn some calories.
You can also make your friends
play scrabble with you instead of
watching that game of football
and talking all day. You will be
amazed at how excited and ful-
filled they will be when leaving.
Here is a warning though, Scrab-
ble is addictive; once you are
caught in it. You would naturally
fall in love with words and you will
soon find yourself in an exciting
grammatically correct world.
Sport
Scrabble the Calories
By Omede Odekina
