The League of the Lexicon: You’re a Member Whether You Know It or Not

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And Martha, I’ve got a question for you.

This is a trivia question.

Which is not an expression or instruction found on sheet music? Is it furioso, larghetto, combrio, or al dente?

Well, I know a lot of musicians will appreciate al dente after they perform because that has to do with food rather than music.

Yeah, it means to the teeth. It’s a way of cooking pasta just right.

Let me ask you another one.

Okay.

Which of the following is real? Aerodynamic lug nuts, hammer grease, brick benders, or bush hammers?

Gosh, I have no idea. I’m going to guess brick benders.

I have no idea. So three of those are things that you send the newbie at the job site for. Send them on a fool’s errand.

And the one that is real is bush hammers, which are a masonry tool for texturizing stone and concrete.

And both of these questions come from a board game called The League of the Lexicon. And the premise is asking questions about language of people who know a lot about language.

The Makers, Two Brothers Games, have packed the box with thousands of questions. And they’re written in part by people with real experience who spend their lives poking at language.

So lexicographers and linguists with a real expertise have contributed. And so you might have a card that asks for the origin of a familiar phrase.

Another card might present you with a strange definition or an archaic word and have you puzzle it out. Or the card might test your usage or spelling.

And so you get etymology, meanings, oddities, and general word lore. And so this very attractive game is filled with oversized cards.

2,000 cards in the base set. And there are three expansion packs. And these expansion packs include slang, global language, and then a junior edition.

There is a game with a structure and rules and stuff and dice and the whole thing where you build card sets. But in my house, we love to ransack games for their trivia.

And so we just yank the cards out of the box and ask them each other because my wife, who is an editor, linguist, and lexicographer, and I are really competitive with this sort of thing.

So the other thing that was in the box of this review copy I was sent is a book based on the League of the Lexicon board game. This book by Joshua Blackburn is called The Language Lovers Lexipedia, an A to Z of Linguistic Curiosities.

And like the game, it’s got tons of facts and trivia and information like limericks and long words, the history of the alphabet letters, strange punctuation, just tons of things.

That book is The Language Lovers Lexipedia by Joshua Blackburn, and the game is The League of the Lexicon.

So if you like A Way with Words, you’ll probably love this game. It’s for those who get a kick out of the odd corners of language, Martha.

Well, that would be us.

We’ll have more information about the game and the book on our website, waywordradio.org.

And in the meantime, you can always call us 877-929-9673.