So that's what's in the forbidden room! Scrabble! I want to laugh, shriek with laughter, fall off my chair. This was once the game of old women, old men, in the summers or in retirement villas, to be played when there was nothing good on television. Or of adolescents, once, long long ago. […] Now of course it's something different. Now it's forbidden, for us.
1985, Margaret Atwood, “Birth Day”, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, pages 148–149