the quote, of course, is taken out of context -- we really don't know what Borgmann had in mind. but in juxtaposition with the other quotes, the epigraph in total (having now read 180 pages) seems to be getting at the notion that Scrabble, in the hands of the competitive 'geniuses' is no longer a recreational word game testing the players' luck and vocabulary depth; but more an exercise in memory, anagramatic skill, psychology and competitive nature -- based on mathematics and symbology rather than language, with the rules being an arbitrary set of (meaningless) character strings.

this can be applied to a lot of the strange games that are played with words, like anagrams and palindromes -- little or no real information is communicated.

btw, Borgmann's other major title gives one more clue as to where he was coming from: "Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orhographical Oddities", which smacks of some of Anu's weekly themes.