For the Love of Words
“Because I was afraid to speak when I was just a lad,
Me father gave me nose a tweak and told me I was bad.
But then one day I learnt a word that saved me achin’ nose
The biggest word you’ve ever heard and this is how it goes…SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS”
Remember this 34-letter; 14-syllable tongue twister made famous by the 1964 film Mary Poppins?
The online Oxford Dictionary defines “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” as something “extraordinarily good” or “wonderful”, and why not! Regardless of contrasting views surrounding the word’s origin, it’s one hell of a word that overtook the longest word at that time “antidisestablishmentarianism”, with 28 characters.
It would be pertinent to point out here that the genesis of such words is associated with an American tradition of making up crazy “double-talk” words — by cobbling words together out of nonsense syllables, like “discombobulate” — an alteration of discompose or discomfit or “skedaddle” — originating from spill, scatter, skiddle — all meaning a hasty flight. And that brings us to the central theme of this article: word games.
As long as we could read, write and speak, we have played with words. Think of songs; poems; plays, anagrams, hangman games, word jumbles, and so on. This penchant for word making perhaps stems from the fact that humans are so eager to engage in “play” that it is quite likely that the first humans who developed speech, were also the first to construct games with that speech. Think of how often kids delight in making up rhymes…that alone tells us that word games of one form or another have probably been around since language itself emerged.
While some word games combine elements of chance and skill, like the much-loved Scrabble, others might emphasize a certain knowledge and good vocabulary, such as Daily Themed Crosswords.
In fact, crossword puzzles — is one of the most popular and widespread word games. But despite its popularity, it has a short history.
Firstly, the word “puzzle” appeared around the 1590s and was initially used to mean a “perplexing and challenging question” that involved insinuations or codes or wordplay that had to be deciphered in order to get to the solution. However, by the 1800s, it came to denote a “toy contrived to test one’s ingenuity”.
Now to get back to crosswords, the first crosswords appeared in England during the 1800s. Pretty elementary and derived from the word square — a group of words arranged such that the letters read alike vertically and horizontally, they were printed in children’s puzzle books and various periodicals. In the United States, however, the puzzle developed into a serious adult pastime.
The first crossword puzzle appeared in the Sunday edition of New York World, on December 21, 1913. It was created by Arthur Wynne, a violinist-turned-journalist. He called it “Word Cross”, although later it changed to “Cross Word” due to a typographical error!
What set apart Wynne’s puzzle (see below) from today’s crosswords is its diamond shape and absence of internal black squares. During the early 1920’s other newspapers picked up this novel pastime and within a decade, crossword puzzles featured in almost all American newspapers. It was during this period that crosswords began to assume their familiar form.
In Europe though, crossword made its first published appearance in Pearson’s Magazine in February 1922, and in Times on February 1,1930. British puzzles however, quickly developed their own style, being considerably more difficult than the American variety. In particular, the cryptic crossword in which each clue is a word puzzle in and of itself, became widely established and popular not just in England, but also in Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Fast forward to current times, word games among all other online games have picked up since 2013. The main draw of word games is that they’re great for sharpening your vocabulary, it involves a certain fun in the gameplay and kickstarts your day with a sense of achievement, once finished. Because of this, there’s no dearth of word games, including multiplayer formats, on both Google Play and the iOS App Store. Word games fit perfectly with the on-the-go nature of mobile gaming. They’re easy to pick up whenever you feel like exercising your brain, and also fairly easy to put down when you need to get back to the real world.
Speaking of the real world, today, April 13, is #WorldScrabbleDay! By far the best way to celebrate #ScrabbleDay is over a benign battle of words with your friends, family, or even colleagues, with perhaps Oxyphenbutazone. No, that is not just a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. It is also THE word that, in a single play, can give the highest possible score on a Scrabble board — 1,778 points. But it is quite a challenge mastering how to win in Scrabble. So why not start out with some simpler word games, like Word Trip; Word Trek; or Word Jam from the PlaySimple stable — they get harder with each level progression and serve as good preparatory games for the Scrabble feuds ahead.
Now that you are perfectly updated on the terminologies in use through a brief history of word games… don’t lose your cool, if someone called you a GRIPHOMANIAC for griphomania is a pleasant medical condition that induces an insatiable desire to make and solve puzzles.
Get cracking…
