Some 50 years ago, says Susan from Burbank, California, she and a friend made up a game involving prefixes and suffixes, which led to such nonsense words as epidormithry and postpreparize. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Prefixes and Suffixes Word Game”
We heard from Susan Gallant in Burbank, California, who wrote to us to describe a game that she and a friend used to play back in high school and college.
Whenever they had a little downtime, say they were standing in the line at a movie theater, she writes,
We’d start with a word containing a prefix, base word, and suffix, and take turns changing one part.
The only rule was that you couldn’t change the same part twice in succession.
If she had changed the suffix, then I could change the base of prefix.
One could enlarge a part by combining more than one suffix,
And it was also acceptable to add an extra vowel to make the word pronounceable.
There was no requirement to form a real word, quite the contrary.
The more outrageous, the better.
Because the object of the game was just to start laughing.
And she says that after 50 years,
I can only remember one of our favorite verbal concoctions, epidormithry,
Which we defined as the uppermost sleeping accommodation as,
May I offer you the epidormithry or would you prefer the lower bunk?
So the upper bunk like on a train or a dorm room.
Yeah.
That’s cool. I like that.
And so I started trying to play this game just with myself during a few idle moments.
And it’s actually kind of fun.
I went from the term preposterously to postposterously to postpostercise to postpreparized.
And I stopped there.
I decided that postpreparized is when you think of all those things you should have brought on that picnic.
There’s a very common word game that we do that’s a little like this where you change one letter in a word.
We do only three-letter words in my family.
So you might do lid to lad.
You can’t change the same letter, and lad becomes fad, and fad becomes maybe…
Fat.
Fat, sure, and you just keep going.
What usually happens, you end up in a rut, and cat comes up inevitably, and you go back into the cycle, and that’s the game to be over.
Better than looking at your phone, right?
Post-posterously.
I think that’s a great game.
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