My family has now acquired the 4th Edition Scrabble Dictionary (which I blogged about here), and baptized it with some heavy use during our vacation last week. In the course of flipping through it to learn new words, we uncovered a rather surprising one, "fagin", meaning one who draws small children into crime-- the word is obviously derived from Fagin of Oliver Twist.

Keep in mind that to be legal in Scrabble a word must not be a proper name or an abbreviation-- thus, for "fagin" to be scrabble-legal it must have passed into such common English usage that it now has meaning independently from its namesake. I have never heard an enticer of child criminals generically called a "fagin", and neither had my sister. Mystified, we searched for more.

In the Scrabble Dictionary you will also find "scrooge" (a miser), "romeo" (a romancer), and "sherlock" (a sleuth). You will not find "rambo", or "lolita", or "jeeves".

Indeed, we have now begun a Scrabble Dictionary Fagin Challenge: the goal is to find any other literary character who meets the "fagin" criteria:

1: The character's name must appear as a legal playable word in the Official Scrabble Dictionary (4th Edition).

2: The character must originate in a work created in the last two centuries.

3: The character must not be the main- or title- character of the work.

My sister and I have both read a lot of books, but it is quite possible there is a vast current of "fagin"ism out there that we are ignorant of. Does anybody know of any other such words?

Comments are open.

Some time ago, Sara Butler and I (and many others) argued about whether women and men ought to change their names when they married, and if so, to what. Since Sara has now married, she is the latest member of that debate to practice what she preached, and is now "Sara Butler Nardo", just as she advocated. Any future arguments between her and co-blogger Amanda Butler will now be much easier to follow.

Despite my defense of the hoarding of library books, people continue to tease me for having so many library books piling up in my (now-shared) apartment. Granted, I just enlisted friends to help me move all of these books (and many more) up two flights of stairs, so perhaps that was due.

In any case, I have finally been impelled to return some of the less-used or redundant tomes, like the 4-volume diary of James Polk, or the copy of Justice Accused that duplicates one I got for my birthday. The problem is limited bookshelf space; even if I claim every free wall in the living room, I am still starting to run short, so sacrifices must be made.

I heard a rumor that the Yale Library system has more books than it actually has shelf space for, so that if every user were to return their entire load, there would be books piled in the offices and lobbies of the libraries. I have been unwilling to see if this story was really true, but it provided a great retort to those who criticized my promiscuous borrowing and reading habits. At any rate, whether or not it is true of Yale, it is now true of Howe Street, and with Labyrinth opening in the next few months, it will only get worse.

Reader Dan Strunk sends along news of this exciting development-- book vending machines on the streets of Paris.

As an economic matter, I suspect that these things would not do much better here than the assorted street vendors with battered paperbacks and folding tables, but I think serious university or law-school towns ought to think about installing a machine of classics that students occasionally need. Maybe The Federalist, The Anti-Federalist, Theory of Justice, The Constitution of Liberty, The Bluebook, and so on. Of course people can access the libraries but often not 24 hours a day, and some books beg to be tabbed and written in.

Jim Thompson, a law student at Denver and one of my IJ co-workers this summer, writes in to share a fight he recently had with Professor J. Brown about the FDA, fish, mercury, and freedom (a subject co-blogger Raffi has posted about here and here).

Jim writes:

If you had any doubt that liberalism (and not of the classical sort) reigns in law schools all across the country and not only in the hallowed halls of Yale, put them to rest.

The first assignment for my administrative law class was to read a WSJ article about the FDA warnings regarding canned tuna. Canned tuna is high in mercury, which if taken in large quantities can prove harmful, especially to developing children. The FDA can issue warnings, but cannot generally regulate foods when the harmful element occurs naturally and is not added in production. Albacore tuna is especially high in mercury.

Professor Brown posed the question to the class, "What would be an argument against the FDA banning albacore tuna altogether?" [seeking a policy argument]

One student offered an economic argument (although not clearly articulated) which can be boiled down to this: The costs of eliminating the albacore tuna industry (in job loss, etc.) would be greater than the benefits arising from the ban.

Professor Brown asked for another argument, I ventured a reply:


"I quite enjoy Albacore Tuna and don't particularly care about the Mercury. I think I should be able to make my own decision whether to eat tuna. At most, the FDA could require the tuna companies to disclose the presence of mercury on the label."

After a pause, Brown replied. "Wow, I never expected anyone to raise that argument."

Turning to the class, he said, "Now I'm sure Jim is not one of these people, but some argue that the FDA should not ban any harmful foods, but allow people to make decisions based on the warnings."

J: "But I am one of those people"


PB: "Oh, well in that case, can anyone in the class tell me why Jim is wrong."

J: "But I'm not wrong"

PB: "This is my class, and you are wrong." (something to that effect)

A few students then proffered weak arguments about why I was wrong, the best one relating to the healthcare costs the government would have to cover for indigents who eat way too much tuna. [I've blogged about the weakness of this argument here.--WB]

What bothers me is certainly not that Professor Brown disagreed with my position. Rather, what bothers me is that he would teach his class that my position is absolutely wrong, as if it were a provable fact. Furthermore, Brown offered no justification for his position that I was wrong, except for the shaky student arguments (although he might have had valid pedagogical reasons for moving on so quickly). Finally, Brown's initial suprise at my position is quite disturbing. This seems to imply that not only are libertarian ideas wrong, they are sooooo wrong that they would not normally appear in the classroom. (In Brown's defense, he did allow some discussion of the idea).

I was rather shocked that you posted Jim Thompson's story about his Admin class without comment. He says at the beginning: "If you had any doubt that liberalism (and not of the classical sort) reigns in law schools all across the country and not only in the hallowed halls of Yale, put them to rest."

But of course that is not what the story says; what it says is that one Admin professor at one law school is a liberal, and (more to the point) was an asshole about it in class. That's all.

If the story is accurate (and based on my law classes, I suspect what was really going is that the professor wanted to get the other side out, and didn't really want to waste time arguing with Jim), then Prof. Brown deserves to be condemned. But to take this one example as evidence that liberalism "reigns," "all across the country," is laughable.