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Showing posts from June, 2024

Online Dictionary dilemmas

Okay, so the Zen Word game doesn't have the "best" dictionary.  No online game will have the same word set that my brain has stored.  This game is missing older versions of key verbs, so HATH and SAITH are not there, however many times they show up in the Bible.  But THEE and THOU ar(t).   It's weird when a singular or plural is accepted but not both.  So it accepts MEDS but not MED, REC but not RECS.   Don't ask me how it accepts GLOP but not GLOOP, takes BONG and BING but not BOING.  WONK and THO and VAIL are ok but NAV and ZIN (short for Zinfandel, the wine, a valid Scrabble word) and LITH are not?  As far as artifacts go, TOR (the monument) is okay but TORC (the necklace) is not? Each game decides on what to censor.  This game accepts PEE, PEED, PEES, POO (etc) and PORN where the other word unscramblers did not.  Words that are considered racist, or gender-related insults are blocked, and I won't type those here.  But it does take ASS (which is an animal)

Acceptably Exceptional

On the ride home from work, the Conway Show was on the radio with Tim Conway Jr, and he threw out some fun wordplay.  He said that for Father's Day, he received a message from a friend saying he was an "acceptable" dad.  To which, he made a joke at the time, so the friend backtracked and claimed that he actually said, "exceptional,"  But someone wrote it down wrong. So, here we have two words that sound very much the same, but they are at opposite ends of the scale of compliments.  Conway said he actually liked "acceptable" as the better compliment, because it was more honest.  "Exceptional" just sounded puffed up and fake.  Or, as he put it, "I have met many exceptional dads over the years, and I'm not in that company." That bit was exceptionally acceptable.

Zen Word

I got a bit tired of the word unscramble games I had been poking at in between other things lately.  A while back I switched to Zen Word, which is very similar to the others (Word Collect and Word Trip), but it just has a more relaxing vibe.  Some app was also installing games when I never asked for them.   Zen Word boots up with a little uplifting quote, and has short 3-line poems for each new "location".  The poems are not very good ... they have a good choice of words but only a few had a decent rhythm.  It's so easy to just start writing words and forget to read theam aloud to see how they sound.  If you can stick to the same number of syllables or accents per line, the result can just flow off the tongue rather than getting stuck in a bunch of extra sounds.  Others felt like they had translation issues.  But it was a nice feature, again going with the relaxing vibe. The dictionary in Zen Word is better than the other two games.  It has full sets of Greek lettees and