I’m an avid player of Words with Friends, a Scrabble-like game for smartphones and Facebook. The trick to the game is not really having a big vocabulary, but more so to have absolute understanding of all the world’s short and somewhat cheap words (I’m looking at you, “qi.”)
Recently I stumbled across the word “za,” an officially recognized word, which is slang for pizza. Even right now my spell check has a wavy red line under both “qi” and “za” and my phone’s text editor made me add “za” to its dictionary in order to use it. “Za” is the worst example of a word I’ve ever seen. Presum-ably it’s more of an weird contraction, instead of saying “pizza,” one would just say “‘za,” as in, “Hey, wanna go out and get some ‘za?” (I both hate the idea of this sentence and love the idea of using it just to be an ass) Everyone I’ve ever brought this to the attention to has been just as baffled as me to why this horrendous word is allowed to live.
For some reason the official Android Market page for the the app encourages its use by showing “za” in a sample screenshot:
If you’re out there listening, Words with Friends people, you need to get rid of this non-word immediately. It’s making a mockery of social online gaming…
