My random word challenge

I like words.  No, I love words.  There has always been something special to me about expressing myself in writing.  I’ll admit that I find a particular joy in finding what feels like just the right word.  It doesn’t stop there, I love crosswords and just about any sort of wordplay like bad puns.   This is, I suppose, part of the reason that I prefer text over voice in Second Life; there is just something about communicating in text that I find fascinating.  (But I’ll  save my ramblings on that dead horse for another post, perhaps.)  Instead I want to throw out a challenge to my fellow bloggers for a little word fun.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I worked for a while doing outdoor experiential education for young people.  Well, when new groups would come, I usually got the honors of doing the welcome and setting up the first activity before we would split into smaller groups.  Well, I always got the honors of doing the welcome activity; it was great fun and part of what I would do was tell a silly story to set of the premise of the activity.  I’ll admit that I really got into telling the story in a humorous and absurd way, but it got so that I did it enough that it felt a little rote.  One day I whined a little about this to a colleague and he challenged me to tell the same story I usually told but to try to do it while slipping in a few random words he gave me.  Being the sort who can seldom ignore a challenge, I gave it a shot and Yay! a new ritual was started.  So after that, before I started my spiel, other staff would come up with a couple of random words for my story (the only rule was that they could not be bawdy words) .  Things seldom felt rote after that!

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and a conversation with the wonderful Kate Amdahl.  Somehow we got chatting about words and blogging.  Actually, I think it had something to do with one of my very favorite words of all time, meretricious. ( I’ve so badly wanted to use meretricious in SL, but always chicken out!)    But SL is probably one of the only places where you could use the word and someone might thank you for it.  We had a good laugh over this, of course.  But from it, a new challenge was born.  We traded  words that we were going to publish in our next blog post.  I got: transcend, marshmallow-like, absenteeism, vim, panacea and Kate got: meretricious, pus, moist, pugnacious, and flaccid.   So we both dove into our respective challenges and I used them in my post called /me doesn’t understand and Kate posted them in her post “My Secret Plan to Wear Everything.”

So, how about it folks? My challenge is that you try to convince three blogging friends to play this little game with you.  No, this isn’t one of those things where you tag people and expect them to give it a go; this is best done with friends and as your own little secret challenge.  So ask three friends or acquaintances to try this challenge.  Once you’ve agreed, you each get to pick out a few words for the other person to try to fit in their blog post (heck, you even can decide how many words you’re most comfortable trying….three?…five?) They don’t need to long, fancy or difficult words, they just have to be fun.  If Dr. Seuss can write Green Eggs and Ham using fewer than 50 words on a bet, how hard can it be to plug some silly words into your next blog post?