Marie Curie & me

Would Marie Curie have known the word "loogie"?

Probably not. Merriam-Webster defines "loogie" as "a mass of saliva and phlegm hawked up from the throat" and first locates the word in print in a baseball article from 1967. Since Marie Curie was neither a baseball fan nor alive in 1967, the person who played the word "loogie" in a Words with Friends game this afternoon was probably not really Marie Curie.

Of course I knew from the first that I was playing against a bot, and not just because of her unusual word choice. Marie is just one of ten Women of History bots available for individual play this week, and I knew something was screwy about this challenge from the first because of the tag phrase that came up when I clicked Play: "I was the first woman, so far, to win two Noble Prizes. Think you got what it takes?"

I have a few problems with this statement.

1. "Noble Prizes"? Granted, "Nobel" is a proper noun and is therefore not playable in Words with Friends, but surely someone who works for that fine organization should know that the prizes are named for Alfred Nobel, not anybody Noble.

2. This Marie Curie bot claims to have been "the first woman, so far, to win two Noble Prizes," but what can "so far" possibly mean in this context? You think some other woman is going to suddenly waltz up and become the first woman to win two Nobel (not Noble) Prizes? Only if she invents a time machine!

3. "Think you got what it takes" is pretty informal English, not what you'd expect from a highly educated scientist whose writing tends toward the formal academic end of the spectrum.

For the record, I have indeed got what it takes--I creamed Marie Curie, despite her clever placement of "loogie" on a triple-word score. She's got pretty good aim for a dead person.