Scrabble
I started the unofficial
Scrabble Club in my sophomore year in high school with Mr. Finn as Coach.
He's very good at Scrabble: only one student beats him every decade, and
I was one of them. The winning word I used was "seducing" which touched
two triple word scores. I had a '97 "Page a day" calender for Scrabble
and it was fun to compare my answers with Mr. Finn's. I feel good about
the last game I played with him. Although I lost, The first word I used
was "fainter" which put me at a significant advantage. However, Mr. Finn
very tactfully played "fils" from the top-left square vertically, so the
"s" met my "kite." I thought that neither "fils" nor "skite" were words
and challanged, but in fact they both were. He got a lot of points and
another turn. I felt almost no pressure because I was "in the zone" as
Mr. Finn put it, which I suppose is his term for the rare occasion when
I play smartly ;)
Mr. Finn's always been a great teacher and companion
to play scrabble with. I love all of jokes and sayings that always go along
with the Scrabble game. If you talked with a neutral party during the game,
he would say "no kibitzing" which makes sense, because that is an actual
rule. If you said "I have terrible letters" he'd say "A poor craftsman
blames his tools." If you said "If only I had an 'e'" he'd say "If my grandmother
had wheels she'd be a bicycle." If you did something good or played in
a spot he'd play in (or in my case beat him [once]) he'd say "you double-crossing
dog-nosed prune-faced..." in a joking manner. If you played a word that
was correct and he didn't know it or a wrong one that he didn't challenge,
after looking in the dictionary he'd refer to the action as "zizzing."
I wrote a HyperCard stack that tested you on your
two's, but I didn't want to type in all the three-letter words, so I stopped
there.