{"id":541,"date":"2011-07-12T16:49:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-12T16:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.net\/blog\/?p=541"},"modified":"2011-07-12T16:49:51","modified_gmt":"2011-07-12T16:49:51","slug":"words-with-no-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/words-with-no-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Words with No Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while ago I wrote about the specialized vocabulary shared by seasoned crossword puzzle aficionados \u2013 words that tend to have a lot of \u201ce\u2019s\u201d in them, like ep\u00e9e and ewer, essential to the crossword fill surrounding the theme words.\u00a0 I have come to know exactly what these words mean, even though they have no place in a casual conversation.\u00a0 I also realize that I have a whole separate\"\"<\/a> vocabulary of words that are totally meaningless, words like teel, theine, haet, snaw, all words that I have come to value through many hours of playing Boggle.\u00a0 Knowing the meaning of these words is totally irrelevant – all I have to know is that the word exists.\u00a0 Actually some of my frequent Boggle words are happy typo accidents \u2013 a misspelled hate became haet, misspelled teal became tael.<\/span><\/p>\n

It all started about 8 years ago when my sister-in-law Debbie introduced me to online Boggle.\u00a0 We share a love of word-play and on family occasions we always bring out a bag of letter tiles and play games like anagrams, speed scrabble or Boggle.\u00a0 In Boggle, there is a 5 by 5 grid of letter cubes, and within 2 minutes you have to find as many words from adjacent cubes as you can, with bonus points awarded for length and uniqueness.\u00a0 Very quickly you learned to spot fruitful combinations of letters, i.e the \u201cght\u201d that will get you words like night, sight and even the obscure \u201cdight.\u201d Spotting an \u201cing\u201d is critical to success, since appending this to various verbs results in bonus points for length.\u00a0 I also took advantage of anagrams \u2013 if I spotted the word \u201clair,\u201d I could quickly reel off\"\"<\/a> lira, liar, rail, aril, rial and lari.\u00a0 I did recall from my remote college botany days that aril was a seed coating, but only just now found out that lari is a coin from the Maldives, joining lira (Italy) and rial (Iran) as other anagrammatic currencies.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

These sessions of Thanksgiving and Christmas Boggle separated us from the more casual player, until, of course online Boggle.\u00a0 There it was, online, 24\/7, and I foolishly opened the door and let the devil waltz in and make himself at home.\u00a0 This online version was particularly seductive since it assigned you a color indicating your skill level, ranging from the neophyte green, through blue, purple, orange and elite red.\u00a0 If you beat another online player with a score higher than you, your score increased, and if you reached certain cut-off points your banner color changed.\u00a0 Blue was 700 and red was 1500.\u00a0 When I first signed on to play I was assigned the middle of the road purple, but I quickly plummeted until I got enough experience to start my slow climb up, chipping away at the colors.\u00a0 It took me two years but I finally and briefly got to the red level, and then explicably went into a frustrating orange slump.\u00a0 (An embarrassing detail was that the site recorded the number of times that you played, and if you multiplied that by the 2 minutes for each game, you immediately got an idea of what kind of time suck you had fallen into.\u00a0 My tally remains a closely guarded secret.)\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I tended to play online Boggle more in the winter, given the more limited range of outdoor options.\u00a0 I enjoy birdwatching in the spring, and decided that I could continue to birdwatch on Boggle in the off seasons.\u00a0 I routinely spotted wrens, robins or tits in my Boggle game, and ernes (sea eagle) were a frequent find, well known to me from crossword puzzles. I also made a fortuitous discovery that if you spelled the seabid skua backwards you got auks.\u00a0 Auks are sadly extinct flightless seabirds of\"\"<\/a> the Northern Hemisphere that basically fill the niche of penguins.\u00a0 Their limited number of nesting sites and ineptness on land made them easy prey for hunters, both for food and for down feathers.\u00a0 The great auk was extinct by the mid 1800s.\u00a0 The Boggle beauty of these birds was that if I found auks, I automatically knew that skua was available.\u00a0 I was always the only person to find the skua\/auks duo, thus netting me bonus points for originality.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I started categorizing Boggle words in different way.\u00a0 My most entertaining game was Boggle body fluids to see if I could find both the formally correct words and their corresponding jargon, \u2013 saliva (spit), bile, sweat, urine (pee), mucus (noun), mucous (adjective), sebum (oil), semen (cum), and then I made the executive decision to force fit feces and its jargon (pooh, crap, shit) into my growing list of fluids.\u00a0\u00a0 Snot was also easy to find, but its more formal partner, phlegm, was more problematic.\u00a0 After a couple years of looking, I made a deal with myself that if I ever found phlegm, I would shut down the Boggle site and kick the devil out of my house for good and go cold turkey.\u00a0\u00a0 Phlegm would be a good note to end on – its combination of consonants would make it a difficult word to find and I would probably be the only one to find it.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Besides, I like the word phlegm –\u00a0 that sly use of \u201cphl\u201d instead of \u201cfl\u201d and that sneakily silent \u201cg\u201d.\u00a0 I wonder if this word has tripped up spelling bee contestants, who probably know that the word would not be spelled as simply as flem, but would wonder what the trick spelling was.\u00a0 There are \"\"<\/a>only a few other words in the dictionary that begin with \u201cphl,\u201d basically just phlebotomy, which means to draw blood off, i.e. a blood test, and phlox, a perennial whose bright fuschia flowers are blooming in my garden right now.\u00a0 Phlegm entered our vocabulary as one of Hippocrates 4 body humours –\u00a0 blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm.\u00a0 His theory was that an imbalance of humours resulted in disease.\u00a0 Each humour was produced by a different organ in the body.\u00a0\u00a0 Phlegm was produced by the lungs and had a cold and moist quality.\u00a0 In contrast, yellow bile, for example, was produced by the spleen and was considered hot and dry.\u00a0 Each humour was associated with a personality type described by a related adjective. <\/span><\/p>\n

phlegm \u2192 sluggish, cowardly (i.e. phlegmatic) <\/span><\/p>\n

yellow bile \u2192\u00a0 violent, vengeful (i.e. splenetic)<\/span><\/p>\n

black bile \u2192 introspective (i.e. choleric)<\/span><\/p>\n

blood \u2192 happy generous (i.e. sanguine)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

As much as I like the word phlegm, the adjective phlegmatic is even better.\u00a0 The syllable break between the \u201cg\u201d and \u201cm\u201d lets that hard \u201cg\u201d come out swinging.\u00a0 In fact, if you overpronounce the word with a hard guttural \u201cg\u201d you could conceivably produce some phlegm in the process.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Despite my best efforts over the past several years, I never found the word phlegm and so continued to happily play online Boggle.\u00a0 And then yesterday it happened \u2013I was coaxed into some sort of Internet Explorer upgrade and in one of those queer internet mysteries, I can no longer open the Boggle website.\u00a0 Best thing that could have happened.\u00a0 As this essay clearly illustrates, I am getting way too squirrely.\u00a0 It is time to move on.<\/span><\/p>\n

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (like post, stop, spot) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.\u00a0 One of the words will rhyme with either the preceding or following lines.\u00a0 Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.\u00a0 Scroll down for answers. <\/span><\/em><\/h6>\n

The\u00a0 Peculiar Intersection of Anagrams, Boggle and Saddam Hussein<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was a big fat —-.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that his weapons of mass destruction posed a threat that was imminent and dire.<\/span><\/p>\n

So with shock and awe he launched air strikes to make Saddam nervous,<\/span><\/p>\n

Trying to destroy the infrastructure including the —- and postal service.<\/span><\/p>\n

Saddam hid out in an underground —- made of concrete<\/span><\/p>\n

And tried to organize uprising from his hometown of Tikrit.<\/span><\/p>\n

He stashed away money, mostly dollars, but also a —-, —-, —- or two<\/span><\/p>\n

But in the end he was captured like a caged animal without fuss or ado.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now this last word has nothing to do with Iraq, a point I will concede,<\/span><\/p>\n

But for completeness sake, botanists know that an —- is the covering of a seed.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

liar, rail, lair, rial, lira, lari, aril<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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liar, rail, lair, rial, lira, lari, aril<\/span><\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>Share: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago I wrote about the specialized vocabulary shared by seasoned crossword puzzle aficionados \u2013 words that tend to have a lot of \u201ce\u2019s\u201d in them, like ep\u00e9e and ewer, essential to the crossword fill surrounding the theme words.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-words-mean"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-8J","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":549,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}