The Ripple Effect

© Thomas Wilson Shawcross 29 July 2005

“ Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega.”

- Paul R. Shawcross

Dad used to recite the Greek alphabet. Typically, he did this at the dinner table, and at Mom’s urging, but he always seemed happy to do it. Oh, it’s not as if he did this every evening, he did it only a few times as I recall, but it made a lasting impression on me.

This impression, I see now, is part of Dad’s “ripple effect” by which his actions continue to influence me some four or five decades after the actions occurred.

In this case, I had diverted my attention yesterday from my usual writing, engineering, and philanthropic work, and I was playing online Scrabble against an opponent from California.* My opponent had gotten off to a very good start; he had flopped a 63-point bonus word early in the game, and I had been trailing for most of the game. I didn’t have much hope of winning, but I don’t like to give up. My opponent was an experienced player and had been keeping me on the run by making lots of words that one normally encounters only in a Scrabble game, such as SKEGS and AA.

As we got to the end game, we had each run out of vowels and were making small-point plays of two- or three-letter words wherever we could tack on to an open vowel. One of those two-letter words was a vertical HO. The H of HO was one row below a row that had a triple word spot.

Then, I drew an R. Quickly, I used the R and the blank tile that I had to spell a vertical RHO and a horizontal RACKS, which made a triple word and gave me 34 points and an insurmountable lead! My opponent was stunned. He asked what RHO meant. He had never seen it used in a game. I guess his dad didn’t recite the Greek alphabet at the dinner table.

I realized that, thanks to Dad, who passed away in 1992, I had won an online Scrabble game in 2005. Actually, Mom gets a big assist here, because she was the one who taught me how to play Scrabble. So, in reality, I had felt the ripple effect from both Mom and Dad.

Of course, I feel their influence in many much more significant ways, but those are obvious influences and it takes no great insight to recognize that most people are profoundly influenced by their parents. But, this was something subtler. It was a RHO in a Scrabble game! The ripple effects created by Mom and Dad in the 1960’s had led directly to me winning a game on 28 July 2005. How weird is that?

Of course, one could go back even further. I was feeling the ripple effect from 1930, when Dad had been taught the Greek alphabet at Ritenour high school in Missouri. I suppose one could even say that I had felt the ripple effect of whomever the ancient Greek was who invented the name for the letter Rho. . . .

That’s the problem with studying ripple effects – how far back do they go, and what ripples influenced others? For example, why was Dad taught the Greek alphabet in high school? I wasn’t. Of course, back then the languages used by scholars tended to be Greek and Latin, so that may have led to Dad being exposed to the Greek alphabet. By the time I came along, Greek was no longer offered in the public school curriculum (I did take two years of Latin, however).

I wonder what inadvertent, unplanned ripple effects my life will have on others? I wonder how many other ripple effects affect me every day, without me recognizing them? I wonder why the dinosaurs died? Wait, now I am digressing, unless dinosaurs had a ripple effect too . . .

Note * Actually, the online “Scrabble” game is called “Literati.” It one of the online games available at Yahoo.com and is as close to Scrabble as it can be while still avoiding copyright infringements.