Despite the fact that words are one of the things I am supposed to be good at (a conclusion that might have been made by process of elimination due to the fact that I am certainly no good at numbers), I have never had a mind for word games. Scrabble, puns, riddles, crossword puzzles, Boggle, that game where you think of fake definitions for fancy words, you get the point: I’ve never been able to master these things. That does not mean, however, that I don’t enjoy such games, that I don’t enjoy feeling spectacularly inadequate and tongue-tied. I do! Don’t ask me why; it probably has some deep-seated psychological origin that I would rather not explore.
In lieu of self-exploration, I intend to just spend the morning, afternoon, and perhaps even some of the evening hours at the One Word website trying to write something worth reading given the inspiration of a single word. It’s a really clever concept: Go to One Word and the site will give you a single word to write about. You then have one minute to write anything you want given that word and, at the end of the minute, you can submit what you have written to the site. The site then posts what you have written along with the often hundreds of things that other people from all over the world have written about that single word as well.
Be warned, however: This is addictive. If you are anything like me, you will read what other people have written, think they have written something better than what you have written, and will then feel compelled to try again to better this anonymous competition. This process can go on indefinitely. It could, theoretically, go on for a lifetime.