Is this really an anomaly?
Scooter is surely a better known word than
creosote. It was played by more than twice as many people in the puzzle the other day. Both words are more commonly used as nouns than verbs, but players might like to take a chance on adding a
D to the end of either of them - if they think of the base word.
This "anomaly" (if that's what it is) was raised in January last year by ridethetalk when there was a puzzle with the same letters. I can readily accept that
creosoted should not be classed as common.
Creosoting is already rare. I feel
creosote, the noun, is better known, and should remain as a common word in our lexicon.
However, should
scootered become common, to justify the continuing possibility of a puzzle with those seed letters? When Chihuahua started,
scootered was not even recognized as a word. This was
queried in 2009 when a few players said they were surprised it was not accepted. I agreed to add the word, saying:
Scooter as a verb meaning "travel by or ride on a scooter" is listed by a few dictionaries, including a number of the Oxford dictionaries.
Examples of scootered in use are not as plentiful as of scootering (which, of course, is too long to be of interest to us). However, there are some. For example a story on the contactmusic.com website in 2006 was headlined "TOM HANKS - HANKS SCOOTERED AROUND PARIS". And a New York Times article in 1993 said, "'Teddy Boys' slapped on a dollop of Murray's pommade (sic) and a lot more attitude as they scootered and slouched about." (Actually, I thought the scooter was more associated with the mods than the teddy boys.)
So I agree, T and others, that scootered could have been acceptable as a second 9-letter word, and I will add it to the list, though it might be a long time before the opportunity arises again.
This was way-y-y back, before 10-letter word puzzles. When I brought in the 10-letter option, I picked up the 10-letter words from the same source list (YAWL), so
scootering missed out, and remains to this day a non-word in Chi. Obviously, this should be rectified - as I said in 2009,
scootering is more frequently used than
scootered. However, my inclination is to add
scootering as a rare word, leave
scootered as a rare word, and drop that set of letters as a puzzle seed. What do people think about that?
