Which of these 15 words do you recognize as English: odea, piano, po, id, ae, na, vail, vae, ana, io, lout, kembs, time, pom, ide? Fair enough, piano, id, lout and time; and pom, if one allows Australian racist slang. But the rest?

My favourite dictionary has 1,850 pages. It lists odeum, an auditorium, plural odea; ae, Scots for one; na, “obsolete” for not; vail, “archaic” for doff; ana as a collective noun for things like Victoriana or Gandhiana. Except for ae in Scottish ballads, these five words are entirely novel to me, and, I’d guess, to 99.5 per cent of educated Englishmen. The remaining five words not even my fat dictionary has ever heard of.

You’ll have guessed: all 15 words figured in the first six plays of a game of high-level Scrabble that I recently read about. Presumably, the weird ones are in the official Scrabble word-list, though I haven’t consulted that farrago of absurdities to be sure, still less some maxi-dictionary to discover what they mean, if anything. But I mustn’t bang on against Scrabble: I’ve done that once, and if people enjoy the game, and choose to suppose it uses the English language, so be it. For now, anyway.

My point is different: the way language depends on its context — who is using it, to what kind of audience, for what purpose, in what setting. Scrabble’s list is the extreme case: a verbal rag-bag that doesn’t have to be understood at all, and thus arguably isn’t language anyway. But look even at plain, real-world English.

There’s an old limerick well-known to Britons of my age and education:

There was a young lady of

Ryde

Who ate a green apple and

died.

The apple fermented

Inside the lamented,

And made cider inside her

inside.

To anyone English, that needs no explanation. But imagine you’re a schoolkid born and learning English in, say, rural Ghana. Just what is an apple? — you’ve never seen one. Why a green apple? Why did the young lady die? Why call her the lamented? What is cider? We Brits know what apples are, and that a green one is probably unripe, which may— traditionally in many British households, though untruly— mean it’s unhealthy to eat. We know the lamented is a play on the deceased, and that cider is a drink made from apples.

And, not that it adds to our understanding, some of us know that Ryde is a town on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast. Some may even know that limerick, the name for a facetious verse of this format, comes from the Irish town of Limerick, though few, certainly not I, could say why.

Each word has its resonance, for us. Not for the young Ghanaian. He may not even realize that the verse is humorous — maybe he has never met another limerick. The grand-daddy of the limerick was Edward Lear, a Victorian watercolourist of landscapes, not the least in India. The form has been popular, and much developed, ever since. Our Ghanaian knows none of this.

To help him, here’s another one:

There was an old man who

would gabble

Metetymological babble.

When they said, “That’s

absurd —

You call that a real word?”

He replied, “Yes, I learned it at

Scrabble”

In fact, he couldn’t have: I’ve just invented it. But wait for the next edition of the Scrabble word-list, and who knows?