The last few weeks have seen a distinct uptick in wordplay in my life. I'm sure all my readers know that I'm a big wordplayer, but I've been messing about with words IN MY SPARE TIME. Good way to keep my mind engaged, to be sure. A few examples:
About 20 of the teachers held a pool for the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament, aka March Madness. I volunteered to send out updates on the scores and standings for correct choices on brackets. Each night during the early rounds, when there were as many as 16 games a day, I sent out an update, giving each person's total points for correctly choosing winners of games. On a whim, the first night, I included nicknames for each person - sometimes pre-established, sometimes coined off the cuff. I quickly decided new nicknames with each update, while time-consuming, could add a bit of fun to the emails. They quickly devolved into wordplay: Josie, full name Josephine, became Josie "Feen" _______. Then food-related word play: Mr. Camp was "Smores," "Engel Hair Pasta," and so on. I ended up assigning everyone famous videos from youTube, classic rock songs, and so on. To wrap up, I actually turned the list into an online MadLib game. Definitely took a lot of pride in that email sequence.
I've always been a crossword nut, but a similar practice has become my "doodling:" the word square. A word square is a square of letters (4x4, 5x5, 3x3, so on) in which you can read words across each row, and if you read down the columns from left to right, the words are identical, like so:
TOP...FANG...DAMN
ODE..ALOE...ALOE (ALOE is a useful word for this, with 3 vowels)
PEN..NOUN..MOOR
.......GENT...NERD
So yeah, I do those in my spare time, and I introduced the idea to a friend of mine who used to teach at IST and came down last week to visit, who also happens to be a great lingophile. We worked on a few together, and nearly completed a 6x6 square!
Additionally, for this same friend, as a surprise, a fellow teacher and I organized a spelling bee for IST teachers to compete in one evening. As I wanted to participate, I wasn't able to be involved in the words or anything, but I was able to compose some more humorous emails in promotion of the event, centered around the idea of spelling. The sheer fact that we put on a spelling bee for FUN speaks volumes about our lexical looniness.
And now, just yesterday, I came across a triumph of poetry, which takes the word square into the next dimension. Here's a poem by Lewis Carroll, brought to my attention at the good folks at www.inkyfool.blogspot.com :
Read it across rows, then down the columns. That's right. The same.Naturally, I took this as a challenge, and promptly composed my own (formatting issues prevent me from aligning in the same way Carroll did):
As ever your hair winks,
Ever I eye that turn.
Your eye pierces through me,
Hair that through ages dazzled,
Winks turn me dazzled, woozy.
But I wasn't satisfied. Carroll's is a 6x6, AND it rhymes. Well, my second attempt is still 5x5, but I think it's more eloquent, and it follows a metrical structure:
Under heaven I can sojourn,
Heaven barely can I see.
I can languish or remember,
can I? Or, unwilling, flee?
Sojourn, See, Remember, Flee... Surrender.
I'm seriously proud of this stuff.
I decided to use these in my classes - I try to do a bit of wordplay every week in my class, and I also know that sharing my own writing and showing that this stuff impacts my daily life is a great motivator for students. So today, in one period, I showed them word squares and these square poems, challenging them to come up with any of their own. One astute guy realized that if you take the lower-left-to-upper-right diagonal of a word square, you get a palindrome (a previous wordplay topic - I LOVE connections!) although it's not always a normal word - in the case of the square above that begins with DAMN, you do get NOON, so that's something.
We set out to make a square together as a class (mind you, making a word square can be a process of trial, error, and at times, abandoning attempts, so this was a risk). I cannot recall each of our four lines we were ultimately successful on, but I do recall the second and fourth lines, and have recreated an equivalent square that fits those lines:
MORE
OMAN (like the country)
RAKE
ENEE....ENEE is the Honduran equivalent of Consumers Energy, as far as I know. A bit of a stretch, yes, but it did provided some laughs.
As I was filling in the final E, the wonderment of some students became just too great, and MJ burst out in delight, "That is CRAZY!!"
Anything more than mild chuckles at a wordplay session is considered a success. This bypassed it all. I think I've inspired a couple word nerds to take on a new spare-time filler.
Then, as the students were filing out, Birdo said, "Bye, Mister...wait, I'll make a word square...BYE, YES, uhhh..." And I just had to burst out, "ESO!"
