Word Games

I am terrible at word games. In forty years of marriage I have beaten my husband once at Scrabble. I stink at Boggle and Word Twist defeats me. This failing is odd given that I am a writer and have a fair sized vocabulary at my command. But put me in competition and I go blanker than Sarah Palin upon being asked to name the members of NAFTA. Ah, that would be Nigeria, Africa, Tibet, and America…right? Huh, right? Sometimes I lose points just because I can not spell the words I do remember. It is seriously embarrassing not to know how to spell.

My daughter informed me at the Thanksgiving dinner table that the two most looked-up words in the Merriam Webster Dictionary this year were “quantum” and “solace” — I guess folks were having a hard time understanding the razor sharp dialog of the new James Bond movie. Or perhaps this is urban legend. The movie did not come out until late in the year. I don’t believe for a minute that the population has that much interest in units of measurement in space. Solace I can understand — we are all hurting from the recession and are finding solace in each of our own unique ways. Booze, comfort food, raising poi.

I have been playing Scrabble on Facebook with my buddies. They threw me a curve ball be laying down the letters for “axion” — hey, I object! There is no word “axion” I challenged. Well, dagnabbit there so is. It just happens to be a hypothetical subatomic particle or something like that. Billions of them go into making a quantum. I find solace by acknowledging that I have now added another word to my extensive repertoire. My friends cheat. They use words like Jo and nae. If we are allowed to use words from previous versions of the English language (like from Chaucer) then they sould accept my “nonce” and “smythe”.

I made up a nifty little word game to share with my Internet buddies. We are all gaga about handbags and make-up, so I suggested to try to combine words from the Crime lexicon with words from the Handbag or Make-up vocabulary. I started it out with Purloined Prada and St. Valentine’s Day Mascara. My favorite handbag entry was Knockoff. Kudos, my friends are brilliant. I suggest you try this game on your trip to Grandma’s house for the holidays.

Speaking of language, I am progressing in my Tibetan lessons. I was quite interested in learning that many  letters in Tibetan are also words. I wondered if this were unique to Tibet but yesterday I went to the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition called Assyria. There I learned that the ancient Assyrians also used an alphabet in which a letter could either be a letter or a word. That got me thinking about English. The only examples of this I could come up with are the letter “a” — it can either be the letter “a” as in “candy” or the word (article) “a” connoting singleness — and the letter “i” (also connoting singleness). Write to me if you can come up with others.

I do not feel too bad about my lack of competitive spirit in word games. No one has yet to beat me in Battleship!