Yes, I’m late for the my Friday entry again, because of fortnightly Games Night with my friends.
On Friday morning I did the weekly grocery shopping, then I went for a run, a short 1 km this time. I set out at a rapid pace, but tired and slowed down, although I felt like I was really pushing myself hard, I ended up clocking 4:38, which is the slowest of the three times that I’ve timed myself over this distance. Hmmm. 🤔 I guess I need more training.
I spent some time during the afternoon helping a friend to test a new Discord bot game for Games Night – he’s implemented Scattergories. So we were testing for bugs and UI improvements, and coming up with interesting categories to add to the list.
During Games Night, we played some games of 7 Wonders, and then moved on to the new Scattergories implementation. Most of the fun was in arguing over which words were valid during the scoring phase. One particular argument was for the category “Words that begin and end with the same letter”. The letter was A and the contentious “word” was “Amanda”. Some players were absolutely fine that it was a “word”, but others insisted it be disqualified because it was a proper noun and hence was not a “word”.
- For: It’s a collection of letters, it’s readily pronounceable, it’s commonly used in English sentences, how could it possibly not be a word??
- Against: It’s just a name, a label, it has no intrinsic semantic meaning in modern English, it’s never used to refer to anything except a person who happens to have that as a name, it can’t be used lower-case, it’s illegal in Scrabble, how could it possibly be a word??
We didn’t come to any agreement, except to reword the categories so that they’re unambiguous as to whether proper nouns are allowed or not.
New content today: