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Dictionary Games
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1
2010/11/05 - 4:21pm

EmmettRedd's recent post about the word game he played as a grad student triggered a memory of a game my friends and I played back in high school. If I can talk about this anywhere, I can talk about it in this forum without (hopefully) coming across as too "word geeky."

What we'd do is take turns paging through a dictionary (this was before online dictionaries) and find a page that had, as its header, the two words that were first and last on the page. Not all pages "worked," as the idea was to provide a two-word clue that was evocative of the pair in the header.

Example ... I just pulled out my old Webster's Collegiate (for the first time in ages), flipped a few pages until I found a likely header, and here provide the clue: "sharpen plants." Now the other players know ahead of time the words will likely have spellings that are close, and must be reasonably synonymous with the clue. Since I don't really want to play this game here, I'll provide the answer as "focus foliage." You get the idea.

My question is this ... any of you ever get into dictionary games like that? Or even (gasp!) read the dictionary for pure recreation. I did, but maybe I was a word geek before the word "geek" even existed.

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2010/11/07 - 8:07pm

Dullard: Someone who looks a thing up in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book. -definition ascribed to Philip José Farmer

The parlor game we played with a dictionary we called "fictionary". I think they've tried to make the game into something they could sell in a store, since then, which is kind of silly because all you need is a dictionary and slips of paper. Each person takes a turn as the word poser (call it what you will): He finds an obscure word in the dictionary, then spells and pronounces it to the rest. If you already know the true definition of the word, so much the better; nevertheless, every player invents and writes down a definition for the word, except the poser who writes down a real definition (though it needn't be worded so as to be very convincing). All the slips of paper are placed in the center and the poser reads them one by one, after which everyone but the poser votes on which definition he thinks is the real one. Each player who votes for the right one gets a point; each vote for a false definition also earns its inventor a point.

My wife and I used to play this with some friends across the street. Ray and I were both word people, our wives were not. What I found interesting was that after we'd played four rounds or so, everyone got warmed up; after that I could no longer tell Alice's and Cindy's definitions from Ray's and mine, and the women started spotting the fake definitions as well as Ray and I. Makes me wonder what it means to be a word person, if the distinction that is so clear most of the time can disappear after only ten or fifteen minutes of play.

Also, my wife beat me consistently at Scrabble. What does that mean? She had her father's tragic instinct for spelling—I really meant it when I said I'm a word person and she isn't—and yet...

Ron Draney
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2010/11/07 - 10:46pm

Bob Bridges said:

The parlor game we played with a dictionary we called "fictionary". I think they've tried to make the game into something they could sell in a store, since then, which is kind of silly because all you need is a dictionary and slips of paper. Each person takes a turn as the word poser (call it what you will): He finds an obscure word in the dictionary, then spells and pronounces it to the rest. If you already know the true definition of the word, so much the better; nevertheless, every player invents and writes down a definition for the word, except the poser who writes down a real definition (though it needn't be worded so as to be very convincing). All the slips of paper are placed in the center and the poser reads them one by one, after which everyone but the poser votes on which definition he thinks is the real one. Each player who votes for the right one gets a point; each vote for a false definition also earns its inventor a point.


Isn't this game already being sold under the name "Balderdash"?

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2010/11/07 - 11:38pm

Ron Draney said:

Isn't this game already being sold under the name "Balderdash"?

Indeed it is. I've played it. Also Pictionary, which gets old fast.

Re: Bridges's comment about Scrabble … there are games that are 100% skill and zero luck, like chess. There are games that are 100% luck and zero skill, like dice. Scrabble's somewhere in the middle. I win often at Scrabble, but get screwed by bad tiles on occasion. I'm not sure that Scrabble is a good measure of language skills. So don't feel bad about losing to a "non-word person." But if she really beats you consistently, perhaps you underestimate her level of word geekiness.

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2010/11/08 - 4:32am

I consider myself a word geek, and I stink at Scrabble. I've even been beaten by someone who was a novice at English. I know of one reason for my Scrabble challenge. I would gladly refrain from adding -es to jinx to form jinxes, triple word score, if I could make an uncommon word like estuates.

So Scrabble play is a particular skill within word geekdom. The English novice above was a skilled Scrabble player in his own language. That's my take, and I'm sticking to it.

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6
2010/11/08 - 5:52am

Bob Bridges:

The parlor game we played with a dictionary we called "fictionary". I think they've tried to make the game into something they could sell in a store, since then, which is kind of silly because all you need is a dictionary and slips of paper.

Ron Draney:

Isn't this game already being sold under the name "Balderdash"?

Depends on what you mean by "already". I don't think it was marketed back when we played it as a parlor game, but I'm perfectly willing to believe that was the name they invented when they tried to sell it in stores.

Heimhenge:

But if she really beats you consistently, perhaps you underestimate her level of word geekiness.

By "consistently" I really meant every time that I remember; we played only a handful of times, but I don't think I ever beat her. And as I said, whenever we played Fictionary she and Alice were as good as Ray and me after only a few rounds. So yeah, I have to wonder whether there were unexpected talents underneath the surface.

Or maybe everyone's like this. One of my wife's best friends was an only sister and had four brothers, all of whom (I gather) told her she was a dingbat while she was growing up. As a result she was a dingbat. But every so often she'd forget about herself, and apparently forget what she'd been told, and I'd see a different person showing through the surface training. In fact I see the same thing in myself: In high school I was a social misfit, but once in a while even then I'd catch myself doing something unexpectedly well in that line, and it was always when I was engrossed in some activity or discussion and had forgotten to feel awkward and self-conscious. Maybe something of the sort happened to Cindy and Alice when we played Fictionary.

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7
2010/11/08 - 8:34pm

Heimhenge said:

Example ... I just pulled out my old Webster's Collegiate (for the first time in ages), flipped a few pages until I found a likely header, and here provide the clue: "sharpen plants."

I thought it was "whet wheat".

Our family plays a game with the dictionary (called, intuitively, the "Dictionary Game"), where you flip to a random page, stick your finger on a word, and then make someone else in the room spell it.

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8
2010/11/10 - 9:00am

Yeah, "whet wheat" would fit the pattern, as they're close enough alphabetically to be in the same page header. For that matter, "hone honeysuckle" also fills the bill. Obviously, the game didn't require the clues and answers to be true synonyms ... only that the clues were sufficiently evocative of the answers. How close the answer pair needs to be, alphabetically, depends on the font and page size of the dictionary used, but after playing the game with the same dictionary all the time (and we played this quite often) we kinda' developed an intuition for that.

And it also helped to notice just how deep into the dictionary the selected page was located. Even though we held the book so the "guesser" could not see the actual page we were on, they could estimate the starting letter by how far the pages had been turned.

For example, "whet wheat" would have been a likely guess if the page was near the end, whereas "focus foliage" would be nearer the front. We all knew that was a valid strategy, so it wasn't considered cheating. It actually got quite competitive within the small circle of word geeks who played the game. There was no particular order enforced, so players just shouted out their guesses at any point. Whoever got it right became the next person to hold the "sacred book," find a new page, and provide the next clue.

Alas, the existence of online dictionaries pretty much precludes anyone from "discovering" this game. I "discovered" it one day when I was just reading the dictionary for pleasure, and noticed how many of those header word pairs made amusing or sensible 2-word combinations. These days, at least for the younger kids, seems the whole meaning of "gaming" has changed. Probably for the worse, but that's just my opinion.

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