playing with Words

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Recently I read that Starbucks was going into the movie business and that one of the first they were investing in was Akeelah and the Bee, a story about a girl from south Los Angeles who tries to make it to the National Spelling Bee. Perhaps I’ve been living in a time warp (poets often do) but I assumed the Spelling Bee had faded in the 70s. Now I see that the movies Spellbound and Bee Season also have the theme of Spelling Bees. Spelling Bees involve students becoming familiar with thousands of words and the same goes for Scrabble buffs. Crossword fanatics need to know the meanings of words as well as their spellings and need to have a wide range of general knowledge.

Two books currently out, Word Freak and Crossworld (suitable for secondary school students) take the interest in words to its extreme, as contestants for national Scrabble and Crossword competitions learn thousands of words and do hundreds of crosswords to prepare themselves. As a mediocre Scrabble player and a poor, but interested, crossword solver, I can only stand on the side-lines amazed at the intensity with which words are absorbed and played with by the entrants.

As a twin, I had a built in partner for word games and we played many in our childhood. One of our favourites was finding how many words we could get from a long word. CHRISTMAS was one of our choice words and we could find 50 words made up from those letters in the blink of an eye.

Another word game we played, I believe is now called Categories. We would list categories down the left edge of the page: Fruit, Flower, Fish, Vegetable, River, etc. Along the top we would write a chosen word a non-repeating letters (a letter per vertical column). Then we would fill in the categories using the letter at the top of each column as the initial letter of the word.

Then there was morphing (although we wouldn’t have called it that in those pre-computer days) in which we challenged each other to turn PIG into COW in 4 moves or less, or BOY into MAN in 3 moves. Eventually we could turn BRIDE into GROOM and such extravagant morphs as that. Of course word squares was another word game we liked, as we tried to fill a 4, or 5 square grid with the letters we alternately called out; our aim being to get as many words as possible within our grid.

The ability to make anagrams is an essential skill for Scrabble players who need to turn seven random letter tiles on the rack into one seven-letter word in order to get 50 bonus points. I soon learned to scribble those seven letters down on paper in circular form so as to break up the pattern and make it easier for new words to jump out at me.

Palindromes (a word, or group of words that can be read backwards and forwards) were always a test for us, and we delighted when we worked out a new one. The longer the palindrome sentence the less meaning it had. The longest palindrome word in the OED—tattarrattat—was invented by none other than James Joyce in Ulysses and, I don’t need to mention, it has not found common usage. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama was introduced by Leigh Mercer, although he may not have invented it, and Are we not drawn onward we few, drawn onward to new era seems to remain anonymous, though splendid.

With all this word interest in my young years, came an interest in word origins and in the adoption of words from other cultures into English. First I searched out Indian words, for example pyjamas and bungalow, and later, when I lived in Japan, I reversed the process and sought words the Japanese had adopted from English into their own syllabary such as KURISUMASU (Christmas), PIKUNIKKU (Picnic), BEDDO (Bed) and HANDOBAGGU (Hand Bag). And, of course, from Japan also came haiku and my birth as a poet.

Rebus, where a picture or symbol represents a word or phrase, have been popular since the time of Victorian parlours. With the wide interest in computer graphics and graphics in advertising, they seem to have had a rebirth. I even saw one recently as a greeting card on the rack at the post office. My childhood magazines often had short stories filled with rebus for us to decipher. Now “I love (in the shape of a heart) whatever” is to be seen on car-bumpers everywhere. We used to solve:

..BLACK ........ MIND ................ IN
_________ _____________ _____________
....COAT ....... MATTER .... YOUR HEAD

to get “black overcoat” “mind over matter” and “in over your head” and thought we were pretty smart.

And how about Lipograms, Rhopalics, Pangrammatics? Early typists knew the latter when they practised using, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.” Inventing words for things and situations for which there are not already available words was another good challenge and even today I hear the program host on CBC inviting the listeners to send in words for “the noise chalk makes on blackboards” or “a non-medical word for the top of our feet.”

Google has 2,520,000 entries under “word games.” In ESL classrooms, word games are common as the learning of English is made more user-friendly, but every classroom should encourage the playing of word games for the mental agility it encourages; crossword lovers need general knowledge; anagrams provide a limbering up of the brain and a way of seeing things from fresh points of view.
Whichever way you look at it, the student can only profit by inventing words, playing with words, tossing words up in the air and catching them in buckets. Words are how we tell each other what we are feeling and thinking, what we want to do with our lives and that we care.

Naomi Beth Wakan is an author/poet. She has written two teacher’s resources containing word games: Word Challenge and Puzzling on the Rim. Available at: www.PacificEdgePublishing.com.