This post is only marginally about politics, but since this is my blog, and no one reads it anyway, I feel that I am justified in bloviating about a pet peeve.
The only game I play against others on my phone and tablet is Words with Friends. I continue to play it even though the folks at Zynga constantly bombard me with ridiculous announcements. Why should I care if I just played the final letter in “shithead” or some other arbitrary word? I’m trying to beat my opponent, and I’m certainly not going to play a letter just to complete an arbitrarily Zynga selected word.
But I stray from my intended rant.
If you play the game you know that there are a lot of acceptable “words” that are not words. This is particularly irritating when your opponent plays them for large scores, though it is only justice when you play one in return. Recently the two letter words Vuand Jahave been legalized. According to the Words with Friendsdictionary vuis a preposition meaning “in view of”. Use it in a sentence, I dare you. Today I played the word “Squiz”, scoring big against my brother in law, who deserves it because he’s always beating me. “Squiz” apparently means the same thing as “squint”. The game also accepted “outweep”, for which I again scored big, as it is a seven letter word. It’s rather arbitrary, you can stick “out” in front of a plethora of verbs; some it takes; some it won’t. There’s no rhyme or reason.
Which brings me to today’s word of the day, which led to this post. I’m not really sure what to make of it. On the one hand, the whole point is that it’s not a word. On the other hand, maybe we owe this to some dictionary wordmeister toiling away in the coding rooms at Zynga, doing his or her small but laudable part to resist a certain stable genius. Here’s a screenshot:
The thing is, if my brother in law played it against me, I’d still be pissed, all politics aside. But then, maybe if I played it against him…
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