I am a ruthless and unrelenting competitor in word games. Boggle. Scrabble. Anagrams. Hangman. I’ve never played Bananagrams, but I bet I’d kick some tushie, in that game, too. I can see a multitude of words the moment the letters turn up. I love solving word puzzles like Jumble and cryptograms, as well. To make it sporting, I compete against the clock. Word recognition pays off when watching Wheel of Fortune. It’s not unusual for me to see the answer when only a few letters are showing. I think Pat and Vanna would be impressed.
I have another way I play with words: as words hit my brain, I sometimes process them differently than what was intended. It makes the everyday conversation, online reading and watching the news an adventure.
Oh so many words! Oh so many possibilities to use them in creative and clever ways. Here are some word types that I like to play with:
Homonyms. Words that sound the same but have very different meanings.
=> The principals expected me to compromise my principles.
=> I grabbed some stationery, sat on my stationary bike and began to write.
This must be so vexing for anyone new to the English language. I feel their pane, er, pain.
Synonyms. Words that sound different but have almost the same meaning. Joy, bliss, glee and jubilance are all synonyms for the word happy.
Antonyms. Words with opposite meanings. Synonym is the antonym of antonym. Fun!
Eponyms. A name, especially a place name, derived from the name of a real or mythical person. For example, a dunce is someone who is slow at learning. Did you know that dunce is an eponym?
The word was originally an epithet for followers of the 13th century Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus, who was intelligent and learned. However, humanists ridiculed his followers as enemies of learning and deliberately referred to them as Dunces. (Source)
How fascinating! I love learning something new. Is there an eponym for learning about eponyms? Maybe I’ll play with that a while and see if I can come up with a word.
SIDEBAR: Have you ever wonder how many words an individual utters in a given day? Of course it’s been studied, and naturally, some assumptions (stereotypes?) and anticipated findings were expressed at the onset. Here are the results of one such study that may disprove a common belief about the talkative sex.
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