A Small Victory

fie to that sei!*

I'm addicted to Word Racer at Yahoo Games. I play whenever I get the chance (that is, whenever I feel like neglecting the laundry or dishes or human contact) and you can usually find me in the fast paced/rated rooms. I am competitive by nature, and I will not play unless there is somewhere near a full room and the people in that room are giving me a run for my money. And I think some of them cheat, but that's another story.

Anyhow, the game bugs me sometimes. There are so many words, especially the three letter words, that I never heard of. And then there are words that I know exist, but the game says it is not a word. Some contractions are ok, others aren't. Some foreign words are good, others are not. Acronyms are ok - in certain instances. The problem is, they use dictionary.com for their spell checking, and dictionary.com does list acronyms and slang, but does not encompass the whole range of either. For instance, shit and piss are ok, but poopy and doody aren't (I know, just stay with me here). So the game gets frustrating when you keep expecting your words to score you points and they don't and meanwhile, your opponents are getting points for words like het and twa and taka (which is a basic unit of currency in Bangladesh as I've discovered, but they would not allow me to use kroon, which is the basic unit of currency in Estonia).

The good thing is, I am not just wasting away hours by playing a stupid game. I am expanding my vocabulary. Look at the words I've discovered in the past few days:

gan: \Gan\, imp. of Gin. [See Gin, v.] Began; commenced.

ait: n. Chiefly British A small island.

roc n. A mythical bird of prey having enormous size and strength.

seel tr.v. seeled, seel·ing, seels To stitch closed the eyes of (a falcon).

jessn. A short strap fastened around the leg of a hawk or other bird used in falconry, to which a leash may be fastened.

seg \Seg\, n. [Probably from the root of L. secare to cut.] A castrated bull. [Prov. Eng. & Scot.]

stob n. Chiefly Southern U.S. A short straight piece of wood, such as a stake.

Look, I can use them all in one little story!

The roc gan down towards the ait where he swooped up a falcon. He undid the falcon's jess with the intention of taking it home to his mother so she could seel the falcon, making a nice, blind little plaything for the roc. However, the seg that was the rightful owner of the falcon got angry and beat the roc to death with a stob. The end.

I have justified my existense.

*basically means I dissaprove of the whale