Juliet Dunlop: A word in your ear… and it’s ‘Gallimaufry’

I know people who are good at both, but again, I like to think they probably have little imagination, treat poetry with the same cool eye as they would trigonometry and secretly prefer filling in a tax return to sitting through a play.

No, numbers are not my bag. Although for a while, I was a bit of a whizz at maths. The sudden and mysterious decline came about when I was 13 (my dad stopped doing my maths homework), and I never recovered. I suppose that’s why it’s so comforting when you meet other people who have the same uneasy relationship with numbers, a shared hatred of arithmetic and the need of a calculator at all times.

Journalists I’m afraid, largely fall into this category. How many journalists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: I’m not sure. I’ve only got ten fingers.

A friend of mine, who loves all things numbers, still likes to remind me of the time I couldn’t remember if the magazine I’d done some work for was quarterly or came out every three months. (I always hated fractions. All that endless cake-cutting.) And don’t get me started on working out the bill in restaurants. So what if all you had was a coffee and your companion had the full three courses. Split the damn bill in half, or you’ll be there all night!

So, as someone who clearly missed the numbers bus and is never going to catch it, imagine my disappointment when a scientist – yes someone for whom maths is not a mystery – was crowned the best Scrabble player in the UK. Trainee physics teacher Kevin McMahon clinched the title with “immortal” – using two triple-word score squares to claim a mighty 158 points.

The tension at the Yarnfield Park Conference Centre must have been acute. This was the British Matchplay Scrabble Championships after all. Row after row of faces deep in concentration, no-one wanting to show their tiles, beads of sweat dripping down spectacles, clocks ticking…

Sometimes, of course, the tension does get to players. Last week, one of the top young Scrabble players in the US was kicked out of a national championship for cheating. He was caught using blank tiles, which, as old hands will know, can be used as wild-card letters. It spelled the end for him. The British champion, on the other hand, won fair and square: “I don’t really play the words for their beauty,” said Kevin. “I just do it for the points.”

There you have it – the killer instinct of the number-cruncher. Obviously, this is where I’ve been going wrong (and my feeling that it’s not fair to trounce your opponent with some obscure word that may or may not have been the currency of some obscure country).

However, future Scrabble success may be within my grasp. If you, like me, yearn to win at least once, then all you need is a copy of the newly published Word Lover’s Gallimaufry. It’s a special section of the latest edition of the Chambers Thesaurus, which focuses on how our language is changing. It includes more than 1,000 new words that have entered the language over the past decade. So, next time someone says, “Sorry, I was intexicated for a moment after spotting a celebutante blegging some eco-bling and now I’m in a notspot”, prepare to be annoyed. While they were talking to you, they were distracted by sending a text after spotting a young wealthy woman flogging some eco-friendly gadgets and now they’re in an area with no mobile phone coverage. If I were you, I’d defriend them straight away, unless, of course, you prefer to keep them as a frenemy.

As new words go, they might not cut the mustard in the Countdown dictionary corner, but they seem to suit the fluid nature of English. We are after all, a nation in love with Twitter and texting. My favourite is social notworking. And no, that’s not a typo.

Scrabble anyone?