Well, Sarah Palin just blew it with one key constituency — hardcore Scrabble junkies, who object to this seemingly family-friendly passage from her new autobiography:

“Everybody in the family played Scrabble and took great pride in hoarding Ks and Qs and slapping them down in long, fancy words on triple-letter scores.” — “Going Rogue”, p. 12.

The problem? Not only can’t you hoard those particular letters (since there’s only one of each in a Scrabble set); but furthermore, even if it were possible, it’d be bad gameplay strategy to do so:

K doesn’t mesh well with most other letters and so you should try to dump it quickly. Q is paralyzing unless you have a U to go with it. If you are happy because you could lay down “quit” on a double word score, for 26 points, I would say you are not a very ambitious Scrabble player, all the more if you hoarded letters and waited turns to do that. (You have some chance of “aliquot” or “quaeres” or “quinoas,” but do you really expect to score “obloquy,” “quassia,” or “qigongs”?, keeping in mind that if you build upon an already-laid tile you need an eight-letter word with q to score the bonus.)

Sounds like somebody’s still stinging over that Katie Couric newspapers question, and slipped in this anecdote to suggest a homespun-smarts intellectual foundation. Palin should have vetted the editing to someone more familiar with the tile-slapping, triple-word-scoring tradition.