The premiere episode of the CW's rebooted TV game show SCRABBLE featured sophomore Linguistics student Jeffrey Pogue '27. Pogue drew on both his experience as a high level tournament Scrabble player as well as his course experience in Prof. Scott AnderBois' LING 0130 course "Playing with words: the linguistic principles behind word games and puzzles". After a hard fought game, Pogue emerged victorious!

 

Pogue recounts his experience: "It was truly an incredible experience to see my favorite word game given such a high production value! I think a key memory for me was being in the green room downstairs, isolated, while they filmed other episodes upstairs. I was given the ruleset, but all my technology was confiscated so all I had was a pad and paper on a 14 hour wait. Naturally, I started trying to strategize, trying to see how the unique rules might influence what plays I should make. I genuinely thought back to my linguistics of word games class, thinking about how a complete knowledge of your opponents tiles might make certain morphemes more or less risky. In the end, as soon as I stepped on that stage with a surprisingly short Raven-Symoné and a live audience, all that strategy went out the window. I'm incredibly thrilled to have had the opportunity and happy to be able to win my episode and shout out the Brown Linguistics department!"