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Word Games Annex

I know some years have passed, but my enjoyment of words never fades.  I just could not continue writing word history articles with any significant authority, and did not want to spread false etymologies, since the internet is already full of bad information.  So, I ended up doing some blurbs about the curiosity of words.  And then some bad times hit and there wasn't much to say for a while.

But now, as several other blogs of mine converge on different aspects of gaming, it seemed fitting to reuse the Word Fixx blog as a place to discuss words and combinations of word in the context of word games, whether you are looking for new Scrabble words or playing one of many online word games, unscrambling or hunting for new combinations.  So, some themed vocabulary builders and pattern finding ideas might be of some interest...

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Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?

RULY, RECK, and RobWords

There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not.  A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it.  I tried explaining it to Anne.  It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds."  It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here .  "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled.   It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong.  Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview.  I have been enjoy...

why not SQUUUSH?

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