Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I learn that I need to learn more words.

Over the holiday season I spent time with relatives in Louisiana. One evening, some of the relatives were playing a word game: Bananagrams. It seems this is a famous game, especially on Facebook or something.

I had never played the game and wasn’t interested in playing it that night. Somehow, someone convinced me to sit and play. This would be easy. I am the writer of books and such.

I was wrong.

During the course of the games, I would look in the dictionary to see if some of the words that people spelled were actually words. (Someone, who will remain nameless, was trying to spell the letter “t” as a word.) Reading through a few pages of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary surprised me. It contained many words that I didn’t recognize.

Yikes. I learned that I had a lot of words to learn. This year, I will read those writer’s blog posts about words and such.