The Top Ten Reasons Why Linguists Are a Pain to Play Scrabble With:
They think of their own native speaker intuitions as a higher authority than the dictionary. They argue about whether they should be spelling phonological words, or syntactic words. They know that anyone can coin a word, and so they do. They try to claim a separate score for every reading of an ambiguous word. They try to claim credit for spelling CV-skeleta. They think it is OK to play proper names, since there is a productive zero-derivation converting them to common nouns. (Semantics: lambda-x[x=alpha], for proper name alpha.) They use boustrophedon writing to cover the scoring squares. They won’t let you count the extrametrical part of a word. They keep trying to spell empty categories. “Move alpha” makes it too easy to get to a triple word square.
The Secret Lair of the Mysterious Masked Linguist 