Christopher and his Cloze
6M presents, Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 9:04 PM.
Just in case you got lost at the website: In red is the blanks. Might be some things wrong! PS Don't tell Ms Cheng.In the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, the unemployed architect Alfred Mosher Butts set out to design a board game. After studying existing games, he realized that games fell into three categories: number games like dice and bingo; move games such as chess and checkers; and word games like anagrams.
Butts decided to create a game that utilized both chance and skill by combining elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles, a popular pastime of the 1920s. Players would draw seven lettered tiles from a pool and then attempt to form words from their seven letters. A key to the game was Butts' analysis of the English language. Butts studied the front page of The New York Times and other publications, as well as dictionaries, to calculate how frequently each letter of the alphabet was used. For example, he included only four "S" tiles so that the ability to make words plural would not make the game too easy. - IS – To increase the level of difficulty of the game, Butts…
Butts called his game Lexiko, and began selling it for $1.50. After it was rejected by Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers, Butts adjusted the game by adding a board with a grid on which to place the letters; he also renamed it Criss-Cross Words. Game makers failed to respond. Eventually, he sold the rights to entrepreneur and game-lover James Brunot. As a result, Butts never made a fortune from the now-iconic game he invented. Brunot made a few minor adjustments to the design, including renaming it Scrabble, which is actually a real word meaning "to grope frantically."
In 1948, the game was trademarked and James Brunot and his wife converted an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut, into a Scrabble factory. In 1949, the Brunots made 2,400 sets, but lost $450. The game, however, was steadily gaining popularity, helped along by a large order from Macy's department store, the head of which discovered Scrabble in 1952. Soon, the Brunots could no longer keep up with demand, and they licensed the Long Island-based game maker Selchow & Righter to market and distribute the game.
By 1954, annual Scrabble sales approached four million sets. Selchow & Righter purchased the trademark from Brunot in 1972, giving them exclusive rights to all Scrabble-related merchandise. The company was sold to Coleco Industries in 1986; when Coleco went bankrupt in 1989, the toy-making giant Hasbro acquired Scrabble, among other assets.
Today, Scrabble is found in one out of every three American homes. One hundred million sets have been sold worldwide and between one and two million sets are sold each year in North America alone. Several computer and video game versions of the game have been released, including a version that can be played on a mobile phone.
Joshua
PS Compre? Apparentely, confirmed by MsC, 'sinewy' is 'wiry', referring to Statia's fingers.
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