Monday, September 10, 2007

Letter of complaint

Lately, I've been playing a lot of Scrabble on the Internet, thanks to Facebook's Scrabulous application. After having played, well, rather a lot of games, I've noticed that there are quite a lot of vowels in the Scrabble letter set. Which led me to write a letter of complaint.

Dear manufacturers of the popular board game "Scrabble":

I have been a satisfied user of the English alphabet for many years. Each and every one of the 26 letters is like my own personal friend. (Except for J, with which I have had a running feud for some time.) But I love consonants and vowels with equal fervour. Which is why I am writing this letter to you: why, oh why, is Scrabble so vowel-drenched?

Now, don't get me wrong: vowels are important. After all, you cnt wrt ndrstndbl sntncs without them. But the Scrabble tile bag has been overloaded with no fewer than 42 vowels.

This means I'm always stuck with letter combinations such as AIIAUOI. I become so frustrated that I want to feed my tiles to an AI (a three-toed sloth) or fling my game into the AA (a type of lava flow). This stress is not good for my blood pressure or my disposition.

If you do not correct this imbalance immediately, the resulting global level of frustration could be devastating. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Now, if I can only figure out where to send it.