Haverel

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.

Grant, you play online Scrabble, right?

Oh boy, do I.

Well, I wonder if you have the same experience that one of our listeners had.

Keith Hampton of Brownsburg, Indiana, says that sometimes when he is stumped for a word, he’s looking at all these letters and he’s got to play something, he just plays anything. You know, puts those letters up to see if maybe they’ll work. You know, sort of like throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks.

And he did this recently with a made-up word, and it turned out that the game accepted it. It was a word. It was already a word.

Yeah.

Nice.

And the word was Haverels.

Haverels.

H-A-V-E-R-E-L-S.

Haverels.

What’s a Haverel?

Well, that’s what he wanted to know. He looked it up in the dictionary, couldn’t find it, and did the next best thing, which, of course, was to call us.

And so I did some digging, and it turns out that in Scotland and northern England, to haver is to talk garrulously and foolishly, to talk nonsense. So a haveral is someone who havers or talks without sense, somebody who’s given to idle, foolish chattering.

Now, what a great word.

We don’t know anything about that.

No, we don’t. We don’t.

So the next time, you know, you’re watching the 24-hour cable network, you know, haverals, stop.

But that is a great strategy for Scrabble and Words with Friends and Word Feud and those kind of games because, I mean, you just do consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant.

Yeah, never know.

And you’ve got a really good chance.

Because we have this instinct about prefixes and suffixes and roots, and sometimes you can put them together in illogical ways.

Yeah, stick on an S and get another point.

Yeah, there we go.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.