Playing With The Phone Book

Words have always been my playmates since a very early age. Once I learned to read, that was it…I was never at a loss for friends. One of the biggest ways to play with words is to take any word and see how many other words you can make from the letters. I would have very set rules for this, too. You can only use the letters of that word. If you need two “E”s for a word, but there was only one “E” given, you couldn’t add another one. And words had to be 3 or more letters long. Example: MATE  1)mat 2)met 3)ate 4)tam 5)tea 6)eat 7)team 8)tame 9)meat   9 words within the word MATE. If I was in a situation where I was bored and didn’t have a book or magazine, I would find a word somewhere and make other words. Many times on the school bus, I would see a sign of some sort and start making words in my mind.

BTW…don’t EVER challenge me to a game of Boggle. You WILL lose…Scrabble is a safer bet because of the separate randomness of the letters.

Somewhere along the line in my youth, I decided to play with the phone book. White pages, last names only. For this game, spelling can be flexible.

How many different colors can I find? Brown, White, Green, etc.

Money? Penney, Nichols, Pentz (pence), Gold (could also be a color), Silver (same thing)

Things in nature?  Wood, Brooke, Meadows, Hawkes.

Occupations?  Baker, Cooper, Miller, Weaver.

With my pencil and paper handy, I could easily spend a couple of hours just going through all the names and finding different categories.

And you thought I was weird BEFORE, huh? Now it’s verified!