Is There a Word for When You Just Missed Getting the Perfect Card or Dice Roll in a Game?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dana from Reno, Nevada.

Hello, Dana. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. Well, I have a question. Our family needs some help.

We are our game players and we’re looking for a word to help us with a phenomenon that happens during our games.

So we like to play like Scrabble, for example, and you might have your tile of letters and just missing one perfect letter. So you have to, you know, end up just kind of throwing out whatever you can make. And then the next, when you pull your next tiles, of course, the letter that you needed to make that perfect word was in the tiles of your new pick.

Of course.

And more like during apples to apples, when there’s a category that you’re supposed to pick one of your cards to play and you don’t have anything that fits that description, then you just, you know, throw out a few cards.

And, of course, the next pull, there’s that perfect card.

And so our family is looking for an exclamation, something that we can say to say, oh, I just got the perfect tile or the perfect card for that last play. And we’re wondering if there’s a word out there for that.

Wow.

Kind of the opposite of Eureka.

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

What does that look like spelled backwards?

Oh, yeah, that’s a good way of thinking about it.

And so you’re looking for a word that’s more expressive than dough?

Well, we tried coming up with something. We tried like, oh, that was a post-perfect pickup. And while we love the alliteration, you know, we want something that’s more powerful, I guess. But that kind of speaks to the phenomenon of that, you know, that’s just what we needed but too late.

Okay. And you want the exclamation itself rather than a description of that moment, like you’re telling somebody later about it.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. We want to be able to tell the other players, the other game players that, you know, kind of like in Go Fish, when you fish what you wish, but in Go Fish, you can still play that. Right?

At least that’s the way our family plays.

But in a game like Scrabble or even, you know, a rummy game or something like that, the time has passed for you to use that perfect card.

So we’re just looking for a word for that.

Grant, I’m wondering if maybe a gesture is more appropriate here.

I mean, that feeling is just so awful, you know, it’s like drawer’s remorse or something.

A hand gesture, like a naughty gesture?

No, like, you know, a face palm, just your palm to your forehead or something.

I think that could be fun and it would give you a little bit of exercise.

Because I don’t know in terms of an exclamation, I was going to say if you were describing it to somebody else, you might talk about it being an oh no second.

Have you heard that term?

Oh no second?

No, I haven’t.

It’s like nanosecond, but the oh no second, O-H-N-O second, is the interval between when you make a mistake and you realize you’ve made the mistake.

Like you leave the keys in the car and you slam the door and just as the door is slamming, you have this oh no second of, oh my gosh, I left the keys in the car.

But you’re thinking about something in real time.

Right.

I don’t know that PPP does it.

Yeah, it doesn’t really.

I’m thinking about the online interjection of head desk, which is when somebody says something dumb, you just kind of maybe either put the emoticon or even just the words head desk in there, which means you slammed your head on your desk because somebody did something dumb.

That works.

That’s pretty good.

But I’m also thinking of poker. I’m thinking about bad break, which is also from billiards.

A bad break is when the balls just don’t break the way you need them to, or the cards just aren’t dealt the way you need them to.

But that’s more general and not about a specific turn.

There’s also a bad beat when you get just a whole hand doesn’t go the same way that you wanted it to and you lose.

So if you’re talking about Scrabble, it would be a tile you could have used, goes to somebody else and they crush you with it.

Right.

Maybe you could call it a crumble because that’s the way a cookie crumbles.

Oh, I like that.

Crumble.

So just yell out the word crumble.

-huh.

So, Martha, this is kind of like the staircase wit of games, right?

Yeah, I was thinking about that.

Esprit d’Escalier or Trevenwitz.

Do you know what this is, Dana?

No, I don’t.

Yeah, esprit d’Escalier is a term for, you know, when you think of something that you should have said, but you only think of it when you’re on the staircase leaving.

The spirit of the staircase, in other words.

Of course, that happens all the time, yes.

So you could call it the La Carre d’Escalier, the square of the stair.

Yeah.

But you’re still wanting something to say in that moment, right?

In the moment, yeah, yeah.

I was just looking at the Eureka backwards because I think that that’s clever and fun.

And so that would be, what, a K-Ru?

I’m going to cure you.

Cure you.

Yeah, if that works for you.

But also thinking about the sad trombone.

Womp, womp, womp.

There’s that, too.

Exactly.

Exactly.

You know, Dana, we’ve got a lot of listeners who probably will want to weigh in on this and share their own stories.

That would be great.

Well, good luck with your card.

Thanks.

We’ll see how it goes.

We’ll see what they suggest.

Thanks, Dana.

Take care.

Oh, thanks so much for taking my call.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Be well.

Okay, bye-bye.

You too, bye.

Well, what’s the word you use if the card or tile you needed comes up right after you discarded the other one?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

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