A couple of posts back I had some fun tinkering with prefixes and, let's face it, pseudo-prefixes that weren't legitimate prefixes at all. For example, to the supposed base word 'bra' I made the prefixes alge-, penum-, um-, verte-, and ze-. Reader Emma Springfield, who lives so far northwest in Iowa that she can see South Dakota, said her favorite game is to take a word or phrase and see how many words she could come up with. I know I ended that sentence with two prepositions but I'm allowed since I used the Oxford comma earlier in the paragraph.
I decided to try Emma's game for myself and used MERRY CHRISTMAS as the phrase. I think I hit the proverbial jackpot because so far, from two M's, one E, three R's, one Y, one C, one H, one I, two S's, one T, and one A your intrepid correspondent has come up with -- wait for it -- 574 words! I made the hard decision to exclude a few naughty/crude/Anglo-Saxon words from the list, which would have 578 words in all with them included.
I promise to publish my list in the next post. First, however, please try your hand at your own MERRY CHRISTMAS list in the comments section. You may be surprised how fast it grows because plurals do count.
And thinking of Christmas actually made me feel cooler in the 90°F (32°C) weather we've had in Georgia this week.
I used this game with my students when we needed a break. They liked it.
ReplyDeleteApparently it is a common game to play.
DeleteI play this game when I'm in hospital and very occasionally when I'm in waiting rooms. However it's usually a requirement that the words chosen contain one particular common letter from a maximum of a 9 letter word. There are rarely more than 20 options. Finding 574 from MERRY CHRISTMAS would probably take me until next Christmas.
ReplyDeleteI'm still working on mine.
ReplyDeleteAnything to while away the hours....
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