did a polish pass on this little evening project from a few weeks ago because I felt like it: ✨ meow.garden/learn-your-twos ✨

context: a few friends and I got into Scrabble over the last few months, which I can attribute mainly to the rise of Will Anderson's excellent YouTube channel. once we got even slightly competitive, it was evident that I needed to memorize the 2-letter words as a first step toward improving my game. I didn't use this tabular guide myself (I only made it after I had successfully memorized the list), but it's how I sort of "visualize" the space of 2-letter words.

why the table? trying to memorize a straight list of the twos (AA, AB, AD, AE, AG, […] XI, XU, YA, YE, YO, THe), in my opinion, makes the process harder than it needs to be. the problem is that it understates your task as "memorize the valid words" when it's really equal parts "memorize the valid words" and "memorize the plausible-but-invalid phonies"! the table strikes a nearly 1:1 balance of valid & invalid words - much more favorable than the 1:6 ratio over the full 26x26 space - at the cost of only 10 exceptional words to memorize.

for example, consider the S and T-suffixed words:

only one cell in this range denotes an invalid word, and learning via list does nothing to illustrate this "hole" in the range! with four of these words being virtually unused in common speech (ES, ET, OS, UT) and a 90% chance of success, you may very well develop the heuristic of "basically any vowel can go before an S or T"... and then get your bingo challenged off the board because the OT overlap was a phony. whoops! phonies like AF, EY, LE, NI, and WA are similarly tricky to internalize since they're surrounded by weird-but-valid words like AE/AG, AY/OY, LA/LI, NA/NE, and WO/YA.

with this tabular guide, you can find your own mnemonics for words correlated by consonant or vowel. for example, I think of B, H, P, and T as being members of the "AEIO club", since all of them take exactly those four vowels as suffixes (plus BY). F and G have a sort of "joint membership" to the AEIO club since their vowel suffixes are FA, FE, GI, and GO. M and N are both extremely vowel-friendly (they form hooks with all of AEIOU!), but they only jointly cover the I since IM and NI are invalid.

bonus content: my first pass at this visual guide was just a 26x26 table with vowels at the front. I ultimately decided to squish the vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel rectangles together, then collapse the vowel-vowel and consonant-consonant squares into a list of 10 special-case words.