It's not every day you hear a grown man "ululate" (lament loudly and shrilly, like a cow). It's even less likely you'd hear him define the word, but Ron Barker did both.

The unsung pride of Boise, Barker placed 10th overall in the 2008 National Scrabble Championship in July, traveling all the way to Orlando, Fla., to test his mettle against some of the best in the world. He won two cash prizes in the non-expert division for highest and lowest win scores (501 and 294) and even had a victory against the division champion. He executed 47 "bingo" plays, which use all seven letter tiles at once.

"You have to be sharp, have to have the right stuff at the right moment," he said. "People like me have fat vocabularies, but you can fall off the ant hill pretty fast."

Barker's climb up the ant hill began 12 years ago - by accident. He was in Reno at the same time a Scrabble tournament was going on, and he participated on a whim.

"I won 10, lost 10 and tied one, and I was hooked," he said.

He first played Scrabble as a teenager and said part of his natural aptitude came from being an identical twin.

"We had our own language invented already," Barker said, adding that foreign language classes in high school helped him think about words beyond a single definition.

After his first tournament, he sought other "Scrabble people" in the Treasure Valley. They have a club sanctioned by the National Scrabble Association that meets the first and third Sunday of every month at Barnes & Noble in Boise. There is no small talk.

"We quietly sit down and lock horns immediately," Barker said. The group has had as many as 19 people show up in a night, but Barker hopes more - especially young people - will get involved and start flexing their brains. "The goal of our modest club is to get more people into using their minds. This game draws so many people from so many different walks of life and parts of the world," he said. "I know people who play 80 games a week. I play three, which puts me into the desert compared to the really serious players."

Despite that, Barker has won four nationally sanctioned tournaments. He has placed in the top 20 in national championships five times in his division, twice in the top 10. He has played in more national championships than anyone in Idaho, though he was quick to say the pool is small and that he is not the best.

"I just know a lot of words," he said. "I hope to work and get my ranking up so I can play with the greats. That's the goal of most Scrabble people."

A national title in the expert division can bring a prize of $25,000. The top haul for non-experts is $1,500, but Barker plays for the camaraderie and the joy of making impossible words work for him.

"I like weird and rare. That's what interests me about language.

"The real common sense players, strategy people with math backgrounds, look at probability. They think two or three moves ahead and can actually set up the board, like chess," Barker said. "I'm more improvisational."

Erin Ryan: 672-6732