We tossed this question to Deke Castleman, Huntington Press’s long-time editor and the Keeper of All Things Grammatical hereabouts. Here’s Deke’s answer.
In February 1990 right after my first book on Las Vegas was published, I was sitting in a "green room" with Anthony Curtis and Stanford Wong. The room was actually a suite at the old Sands that connected to the roof of the casino, where Arthur Frommer was conducting interviews about Las Vegas for his travel-video company (the roof of the Sands had a fabulous view of the Mirage volcano, which was all the rage that winter).
I already knew Anthony, but it was the first time I’d met Wong, who was the gambling publisher in those days. He was leafing through the gambling chapter of my book and when he was done, he approached me, handed the book back to me, and, in his inimitable way, said, "Young man, ‘craps’ is the noun, ‘crap’ is the adjective."
Well, I’m always grateful to be schooled in matters of language (and that’s in any language; I find that when I’m speaking a foreign language and someone goes to the trouble to correct my diction or pronunciation, I never make that mistake again).
Anyway, I’ve had occasion to instruct writers on the proper usage of "crap" and "craps" many many MANY times since Wong pointed it out to me.
When you use the term as a noun, as in "the game of craps," or "five-times odds at craps," or "I’m learning to play craps," you add the "s."
No one has ever given me an argument over that. In fact, the only time I’ve ever heard the word "crap" used as a noun was in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, in which Chaz Palminteri plays Cheech, a gangster with a love of the theater -- and dice. Because Cheech is a thug who puts on sophisticated airs, every time he means to say "craps," he says "crap," as in, "C’mon, let’s go shoot crap." And it’s funny, to me anyway, every time he says it, one indication that "craps" is well-accepted as the noun.
However, I’ve received enough arguments over the use of "crap" as the adjective to know that it’s not at all well-accepted.
It’s technically correct to say "crap table," "crap dealer," "crap strategy," and "crapshooter" (though for some reason, that last is always spelled as one word, with the emphasis on the first syllable).
Yet several authors of my acquaintance, who shall remain nameless, have balked. They knew better, they just couldn’t do it. "Craps table" and "craps dealer" simply sounded better to them.
What the hell; their names are on the covers of their books (though those books weren’t published by Huntington Press, because I wouldn’t have let them get away, on my watch, with doing something incorrect). Other writers don’t know any better and just get it wrong, like I did way back when.
But now you know probably more than you ever wanted to about the proper usage of "crap" and "craps."
