"...because if I don't say something, who will?"

Well, the big day has come and gone, and I'm sitting in a cafe still fighting off the last of a hangover that, all things considered, is blessedly mild. My original plan of staying at home and eating a turkey sandwich in the dark didn't pan out like I'd hoped, and I instead went out to Brooklyn to celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional manner.

I met up with Cat, an old college friend whom the past six years have seem to have left untouched, save for her hair, now a decidedly un-Asian blond. Cat's roommate, boyfriend, boyfriend's brother and boyfriend's mother rounded out the night, and though I didn't know any of them, they broke out a bottle of Glen Livet and the scotch made us all fast friends. Dinner: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans. Talked a little about the state of the world but couldn't pin down each other's political bent and so kept things vague. Moved on to movies and literature. Cat's roommate likes Gabriel Garcia Marquez and No Country For Old Men and is pretty. Her boyfriend's brother has a copy of Moby Dick on his bookshelf, but also owns Spiderman 3 on DVD. By the time dinner was over we'd emptied a few wine bottles and I'd move back to the scotch. Fast friends.

Then the Scrabble board came out.

I'll get right to it: "reteed" is a word. It is the past tense of retee, which means "to place upon a tee again". As in, the wind blew my ball off the tee, so I reteed it. Then I used my club to beat the editor of the Official Scrabble Dictionary so savagely that his own children couldn't recognize him.

Now, I am a man of many inconsequential but nonetheless fervently held beliefs, and chief among them is this: Scrabble, like life, is so much more about the spirit of the law than the letter. If reteed steals bread to feed his family, then truly, what crime has he committed? If reteed withholds ten percent of his taxes to protest the war in Iraq, or uses the copy machine at work to make copies of fliers for his band, or doesn't wait for the light to change before dashing across the street to pull a child from a burning building, there are some who'd stamp their feet and shake their fingers and wave the scrabble dictionary in his face and call him a rule-breaker -- and though they may be right in the strictest sense, their stubborn adherence to such arbitrary and unjust rules flies in the face of the very social fabric that those rules are meant to protect.

I'm not saying that reteed can go around planting evidence on people he knows are guilty to guarantee a conviction, or that his drinking problem can be overlooked because he isn't hurting anyone other than himself. Addiction hurts everybody. Reteed is a really great guy in a lot of ways, and yeah, he's charming, he doesn't go around starting fights, he never drinks in front of his kids. Look, we can go around all day coming up with a list of reasons why we can look the other way, but it falls upon those of us who care the most about him to take a long, hard look at the situation. If we hesitate because it's uncomfortable or embarrassing, then we don't deserve to call ourselves his friends.

My point is this: reteed is a word. In fact, it is so obviously, irrefutably a word that I grabbed the Official Scrabble Dictionary from Cat's boyfriend's brother's grubby little hands and called the phone number for the National Scrabble Association, which they'd listed -- foolishly -- on the copyright page. After navigating the computerized menu for a few minutes I was directed to the voice mail of marketing coordinator Katie Schultz and left a reasoned, articulate and almost entirely profanity-free explanation of why reteed should be included in the next printing of the Official Scrabble Dictionary. (I did drop an F-bomb toward the end, but I was caught up in the moment and immediately corrected myself). And just to show I wasn't fucking around, I left my real name and real number just in case she wanted to discuss the matter further. That reteed isn't included among words officially recognized by the Scrabble people is an injustice, but it will compounded immeasurably if if their mistake is left uncorrected.

I'm waiting on the call.