Common Bonds, a Favorite Word Game Format

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And getting a running start in front of the slip and slide before he flings himself in our direction, it is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Whee!

Whoa!

That’s not water, that’s jello.

Oh, mmm, delicious, delicious slide.

Good to talk to you guys again.

I tell you what, you know, we’re going to do common bonds again. I’ll give you three things. You tell me what they have in common.

You know, there’s lots of names for these. They were in a board game format that was called Tribond. People still call it that.

But if you’re a diehard puzzle solver, you likely know it from, that’s right, the UK game show Only Connect, where it’s called the Connecting Wall.

When I host pub trivia, we call it Common Bonds.

So here we are, Common Bonds.

For example, if I said a report card, USDA inspected beef, and incline, you would say grades.

Grades like that.

Got it?

Gotcha.

All right.

Yeah.

And all of these, by the way, the ones I’m doing here have a sort of a word-based thing as is appropriate for this show.

Here we go.

Crafted, grenade, towel.

Hand.

Hand, crafted, hand, grenade, hand, towel.

Yes.

Very good.

Right out of the gate.

And all of these words can be preceded by the word hand.

Monitor, throb, wrenching.

Heart.

Yes, heart.

Alley, taxes, nine.

Alley, taxes, nine.

Back.

Back alley, back taxes, back nine.

Right, very good.

Going all around the body.

Now, to be fair, you know, usually when we do this in trivia, there are up to six people in a team.

So you guys are doing very well as a duo.

So let’s see.

Pads, bag, holster.

Shoulder.

Shoulder bag, shoulder pads, shoulder holster.

Very good.

Coral, rot, teaser.

Brain.

Brain, yes, brain coral, brain rot, brain teaser.

If you go skin diving, you might see some brain coral.

Oh, I thought you said quarrel.

Oh, quarrel?

Two sides of my brain, sometimes quarrel.

Quarrel.

How about this one?

Finally, splitting trumpet worm.

Splitting trumpet worm.

The famous splitting trumpet worm, yes.

David Attenborough discovered the splitting trumpet worm.

Yeah, look, that worm’s leaving.

Ear.

Yes.

Ear splitting, ear worm, ear trumpet.

Ear trumpet.

Again, something we haven’t seen.

I need a brain trumpet.

Many, many, many, many years since we’ve seen ear trumpets around, but they were a thing.

What’s that, Sonny?

Come again?

Oh, wow.

That’s great.

Speaking of coming again, I will come again, I promise, with another quiz.

But that was it for today.

We’ll talk to you next week, John.

Take care of yourself.

Slide on out of here.

Bye-bye.

Give our best to the family.

You too.

Bye, John.

You can find all of our past quizzes with John on our website.

Just look for the quiz category.

You can also find all of our past episodes and lots of ways to reach us with your thoughts and ideas about language.

Go to waywordradio.org.