The Uterus Fiasco

I haven't uttered a more hilarious phrase (recently) than the title of this post.

The Huffington Post has the comprehensive story, but really it's fairly simple. Representative Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, used the word "uterus" on the House floor, and was then reprimanded for referencing body parts, and later another GOP spokesperson suggested that "uterus" is "inappropriate for children."

To me, deeming "uterus" an inappropriate word borders on misogyny. While that's a broad problem, I an think of one way for politicians to realize how ridiculous it is to get wrapped up around a word, and because it's clear the primarily-male House of Representative is more comfortable with their own reproductive organs, I call on the House to engage in a bipartisan competition of "the penis game" to demonstrate just has silly it is to get hung up on body parts.

. . . Also, I wonder if "uterus" is in the Word Mole word list.

Scrabble Dick-tionary

Fellatio is in the Scrabble Dictionary, but Cunnilingus is not.

Word Mole for Blackberry

Nearly two years ago I was addicted to the game Word Challenge on Facebook. However, eventually I had to stop. Word Challenge word list was disappointingly, and inconsistently prude and also had questionable "words" on their list. I became frustrated and stopped. I'm reaching a similar point now with Word Mole for my Blackberry.

It's the only game I have on my phone, and after a year of not bothering to even try it, over the last week I've been playing it as constantly as my phone will allow (it's a horrible drain on the phone's battery. Like Word Challenge, Word Mole has done a little censoring. For instance, you can't make the word "fuck." But then there are other words that are mysteriously not on the Word Mole list, like fanged, snivel, and puce. This is especially frustrating when you're just a few points away from making it to the next level, or seconds from the game being over, only to discover that a perfectly good word like prattled isn't accepted. It's almost enough to make me want to quit playing, however my curiosity has been piqued. While I still yearn for an amazing score, I'm far more interested in seeing which words somehow didn't make the cut.

The following is a list of words that Word Mole doesn't accept (and I'm sure I'll find many more).

Hewn
Prattled
Roil
Peed
Cud
Pip
Shim
Twist
Quire
Dun
Fisted
Glam
Piddle
Linty
Fuck
Caul
Puce
Pock
Fanged
Toke
Toked
Snivel
Sot
Ibex
Minty
Ribaldry
Tusk
Scrotum
Snivel
Fatted

Scrabble Mania - part I

GAME 1.

Dash: 119, Ori: 212, Gage: 224.

Gage was in it to win it, making double digit point plays on all but one turn. Ori had the highest single play of the game with La/Fax/Ore/Axed for 55 points, however, when Rick played clean/it, he opened up the triple word score to Gage, who was "ice" cold on the way to his win.



Game 2.

The Jew a.k.a. Gage Norris: 222, Dr. King a.k.a. Frederick Dashiell: 114, The Laser a.k.a. Ori Fienberg: 242. The Jew put everyone in check when he played Queen for 48 points, but The Laser made it mate with Vibe/Cape.



GAME 3.

Freaknizzle a.k.a. Rick, Razor a.k.a. Ori, Sonic a.k.a. Damian.

Sadly, Freaknizzle had to bow out after his seventh play, doom. Sonic fought valiantly, but a combination of bad letters, and perhaps some anxiety about his impending (hopefully not doom) Math final exam kept him from really getting the ball rolling. The Razor took it with a score of 274 to 111.




Stay Tune For More Highly Competitive Scrabble Match Ups As The Foundation Year Writing Workshops Wind Down For The Year!

Endangered Internet Species

Who here remembers the Google Whack? There are many variations on the Google Whack, but the way I've always played is that you must enter two words, no proper nouns, without quotes, into the google search engine producing a search with 1 google hit. That's the purist form. Other variants allow proper nouns, and in another, the goal is to get as many hits as there are characters in the two words.

At its onset the Google Whack was an extremely rare phenomena, but you could do it, if you knew a handful of obscure words and some chemistry terms. But like the unicorn, the Google Whack is and was an endangered species. Sites emerged that collected them, and news outlets did stories on them, but of course once they were recorded that Whack ceased to exist. Other websites emerged that seemed to simply catalog vast swatches of words. Google Whacks are a web phenomena that may soon be extinct. If it's not already. I haven't thought about them in a while. In fact, the last I found was a few years ago. On 8/3/06 I found this gem:

popsicle triskaidecagon

The same google search today yields 19 hits. This is compared to

Methuselah bobbysocks

(yes, I know I broke my own rule and used a proper-noun) which was once a Google Whack and now inexplicably yields 448 Google hits.

Googlewhacks.com has what they claim to be an up-to-the-minute and unindexed Whack List, and yet I've tested several of them and not one of those supposedly fresh whacks is even below the century club, several have more than 1000 hits.

... Anyway, yesterday I was using Google image search to find illustrations of emotive monkeys. There are plenty of enraged, happy, sad, and even "sarcastic monkey" (with quotes in the search) yields 400 hits. But a search for "sardonic monkey" yielded a singular hit (not even of a monkey), it's own sort of Google Whack.

Honestly, I'm surprised, I suspected by now monkeys and monkey illustrators would have uploaded images with titles covering all possible monkey attitudes. However, without the quotes sardonic monkey yields over 10,000 hits.

If you're hunting a Google Whack I've found in the past that you should

1) avoid words that could be near each other in the dictionary
2) avoid common favorite words like defenestrate
3) pair two words from two radically different highly technical professions
4) pair something innocuous with a highly technical term
5) pair a word no longer in common usage with a highly technical term

Can you find any Google Whacks, traditional, or your own variation?

If you find a true google whack you can post it in the comment section with dashes between the letters so as to preserve the thrill for future Whackers. Honorable mentions for single digit returns, or for bizarre word combos that return far more hits than expected.

Happy Hunting!

Misadventures in Adcopy #3

What comes to mind when you see this word:



Don't be shy. To be fair, this isn't so much a misadventure in adcopy as it is in brand-naming. The adcopy is fine. But I don't know how anyone could get from the brand-name to the product without the picture.



This is one case where I'd really appreciate the addition of a hyphen, Bump-its, or a bit of well-placed capitalization, BumpIts. Though lacking those things the packaging is much more funny.

Why I stopped playing Word Challenge on facebook

Two words Word Challenge recognized:
Shit
Oho

Two words it does not recognize:
Cunt
Koan

Now, using the google tool, define:oho, I found that according to wikipedia, Oho is the name of the Japanese era that came after Eiryaku, and before Chōkan. Hardly a word that has entered the English lexicon. However, both the free dictionary and the Scrabble dictionary on the Parker Brothers website define oho as "used to express surprise or mock surprise." Unsurprisingly, there are words I don't know, and others that I wouldn't think of in a word game because they seem less like discreet units of meaning and more like onomatopoeia.

However, I'm totally baffled by the failure to recognize "koan." This is a non-english word that has without a doubt entered the lexicon, at least among literary circles. And given that Word Challenge rightfully names "Poet" as the highest rating, they seem remiss in not including it. Oho!

I'm less surprised and more annoyed by the failure to accept "cunt." If they hadn't accepted "shit" then I would have simply assumed that this game is being marketed to children as well as adults they simply decided to exclude the seven dirty words:

Cocksucker and motherfucker would never appear in Word Challenge because of the 6 letter limit, so I've shortened them simply to "fuck." Since Word Challenge accepted "shit," that narrows the list to five.

Fuck
Piss
Cunt
Cock
Tits

As George Carlin noted it's the intention and definition that makes a word dirty, and plenty of words have multiple definitions. They'd almost certainly still include "tits" as a member of the Paridae family of birds (which also includes chickadees), and cock, as a verb. Which leaves:

Fuck
Piss
Cunt

Since they included "shit" I'm not sure why they'd bother excluding piss, which would leave us with two words, one that we know for sure, that Word Challenge has deemed too dirty to be worthy of inclusion and points in their game.

Fuck
Cunt

Still that makes them at least 1/3 less in favor of censorship than Parker Brothers and Scrabble which along with "cunt" would not accept either "shit" or "piss" in their online dictionary.

None of this does anything to explain the failure to include koan, unless perhaps the makers of Playfish find enlightenment obscene.

O.J. would never bother censoring just one or two words from a word game. And further more, O.J. would make sure that the word bank included "koan."

Playfish says that the English dictionary is out of its beta, but perhaps they'll continue to add words...