Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, and today I'm here with John Chu, who is big in the Scrabble world. We're going to talk about Scrabble in the main segment. And he also is in charge of a new Canadian dictionary project. So we're going to talk about that in the bonus section. John,

welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. You bet. Yeah.

So we were talking before we started recording about our backgrounds in academia. And I know you have a

background in math. And I'm always surprised how important math is in board games.

Can you talk about sort of the interplay between those two in your background?

Sure.

I mean, I always wanted to be a mathematician all throughout high school and through college.

And then my enthusiasm for it started to wane as I started to work on my doctorate, and I'll

let you know how that plays out maybe at our next interview. But the thing about the connection

between math and board games is there's two aspects to it. One is that mathematics teaches us to be

rigorous and analytical and to take a reasoned approach to things, which in most board games is a useful mindset to take.

Even if it's a game where you think it's a psychological or there's a large psychological component like poker, there's still, if you don't know the math behind it, it's hard.

Oh, two things?

I guess there's three things.

This is going to turn into a Matipathons sketch in a moment.

The second thing is that if you get heavily into any sort of discipline, especially a scientific discipline,

but I think my humanities friends might disagree.

There's a lot of rote memorization and need time to set aside time to learn stuff that has

very little application outside your niche interest. And mathematics is high on the list of

subjects. It requires just a lot of retraining your brain.

And so if you get to a certain point in your studies where you think I'd like to keep on going learning new things,

and board games are a relatively easy way to keep that dopamine flowing to your brain and to just as a lifelong learning project,

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