Words

Jacob Todd

... a Jarvis cousin ...

Only a soother can stop words
from coming out of people's mouthes
when we are playing The Word Game.

I have been putting off writing this because I don’t know how to capture my pleasure in playing a game Eric introduced to our family many years ago: the Word Game.  

Participants sit at a table, each writing on separate pieces of paper an single word they wish to put into the game, proper nouns excepting.  

Many pieces of paper, one word per paper. 

Over the years certain words appear and reappear.  

Zamboni, for example, the machine that cleans ice.  Now if you put that word into the game, people get it in an instant, if they have ever played the game before.  If not, and I get a word I don’t know, then I do anything – break it into syllables.  For example, I might say that the last syllable sounds like what the witch in Hanzel and Gretel said when she felt Hanzel’s finger when he put it through the cage and she was testing too see if he was getting fat.  Too …   

Someone in the room might say boney and now you would have the last syllable of zamboni.  OK. 

I sometimes hear words and think, yes, that is a word that should go in the game.  Then I write them in my daytimer so I will remember to get them into the game.  For example, I heard Eric say that a woman was pushing twins in a perambulator.  He used that word in ordinary conversation.  I thought, I bet that word is going to be a sticker in the word game.  I was right.

When we were reading the story of the Nativity together, I heard the phrase about Joseph and Mary … “and he put her away priviliy”.  I told the kids right there – I am going to put privily into the word game and I will get no one can get it when it is pulled out.  They laughed, but I was right – the clue, this is the word grandmother said she would put in, didn’t make it any easier to get privily.

This year Eric put a word into the game that was difficult.  In fact it wasn’t one word.  He put in modus operandi.  One idea, maybe.  But not one word.  When challenged that he hadn’t kept the rule on this word he told us no, this was one word.  M.O.  That is what he said.  People use it every day.  But the rest of us didn’t agree. The players finally had to take it to a vote.  He lost.  Eight to one.

Recurring words are flatulence and fart.  They are both easy now.  As well, the word feminist is clear.  Just say as Tom does while looking at his twin, “What Rebecca is.”  The rest of us around the table who are long term feminists wonder why she got that moniker, but the word popped out of the mouth of one of his team members, so that clue worked.

Some of the hard words that we didn’t get this year?  Leo picked up a piece of paper and said, “Woolly mammoth”.  There was a blank look from Naomi and me.  He said it again, “woolly mammoth”.  The one word that we use for woolluy mammoth didn’t ring a bell for me.  If Naomi and I didn’t know the word the first time, we didn’t know it the second.  He said it louder the third time.  Even that didn’t work.  The seconds ticked by.  He threw out more clues.  Nothing worked for a total of sixty seconds, which seems like a lifetime when trying to gather points. 

Well, mastodon is surely a word that will go in the list of words that are now easy to get, but that are stumpers.

We played the game with the Todds, with the Todds and their children, with the Brooks’s, and we played it with just our family when we were alone:  Eric, Catherine, Catie, Thomas, Rebecca, me and sometimes Hebe wants to join in.

Some words make us resort to the online dictionary to see if that string of letters really is a word.  We sometimes have to resort to the Urban Dictionary – but might have to rule that out as an authority.  Just wait until the words make it to the Oxford