Charlotte Livery (21) was expecting a quiet Friday game night with her friends on Zoom. “A glass of red wine, some bourgeoise cheese and a cheeky game of virtual Scrabble – nothing better,” thought Charlotte.
Boy, was she wrong.
One of her housemates had invited a friend for their Scrabble game. The friend, Tenesha (19), is a first-year Commerce/Law student. At this point in the night, Charlotte was unphased: a plus-one is not against any of the Friday night ritual rules
And then the storm hit.
A psychology student herself, Charlotte was no stranger to complaints of heavy content and unreasonable deadlines. “But this Tenesha girl was next level,” recounted Charlotte. “I mean, there are law students, and then there’s Tenesha.” No one else could get a single word in because Tenesha was presenting a monologue on how she is going to memo her way to a top UN position and resolve the human rights issues of entire continents.
“There’s just prima facie such a magnitude of human rights violations! I want to write my honours thesis about it.” Tenesha rants.
The nightmare continued when Charlotte’s housemate broke out the Scrabble. Tenesha’s choice of words were initially acceptable: ‘caveat’, ‘subpoena’ and ‘surety’. “A bit pompous,” thought Charlotte. “But manageable.” A few rounds later, and no psychology professor could have helped Charlotte. “You can’t use those, Tenesha! Only single words!” Charlotte reported that it was Tenesha’s use of Latin terms ‘amicus curiae’, ‘quantum meruit’ and ‘de novo’ that tipped the scale. “Yes I can, they’re phrases to be considered in
totality. I’m using the blank tiles as spaces”, replied Tanesha smugly.
That was it. At the same time as Tenesha shrugged on her Kathmandu jacket to keep warm, Charlotte declared “THE BLANK TILES ARE NOT SPACE BARS. IF THEY WERE, I WOULD BE COVERING THIS SCRABBLE BOARD IN COMPLETE PARAGRAPHS.” The next morning, Charlotte admits she overreacted but also made it clear that she would never play Scrabble with a law student ever again.
