Scenes from a Scrabble game
ME [slamming shut the tiny dictionary Antoine’s had since he was at the Lycée]: Man, I can’t believe douchebag isn’t in there! Grrr!
ANTOINE: Well, you can’t make it anyway.
ME: No kidding.
ANTOINE: I believe it is not a compound word.
ME: Uh, yeah it is…I think. And also, I was JOKING.
One of my favourite things to do with Antoine is say stuff that’s really, really stupid, just to see if he’ll take me seriously and treat me with respect. He always does, which is why I keep doing it; there’s nothing as funny as asking “Can you spay your own pets if you’ve got the right permits?” and not being laughed out of the room. What’s annoying is that, often, when I’m being dead serious, he reacts as if I just told some big joke.
Ah, it’s love.
Filed under: Life
Not you pets, but I’ve been told several times by female friends that they intend to spay their *partners*.
Often quite creatively.
I thought spaying was what one does to female pets. But if what you mean is castrating their male partners…Ew. I know lots of women (but, near as I can recall, none of my friends) like to joke about that kind of thing, but I get pretty humourless about that kind of ‘joke’. Something about the emasculation of men that I find downright creepy, to the point where I can’t think of it in a ha-ha way. (I know, I know, I’m a po-faced bizzo.)
I was not aware there were gender-specific verbs for disabling pets’ genitals; with pets in the UK I’ve always heard it as “spayed” or the slightly euphemistic “fixed”.
Castration I’ve heard is what one does to farm animals, and (if one reads das DailyMail) paedophiles, apparently.
I believe females are spayed and males are neutered, but that may just be one of those things I’ve had in my head my whole life for no good reason.
I’m curious, as a fellow non-fan of the Daily Mail: Why the use of “das” with it every time you type the title?
comic effect.
ps: you’re quite right about “spayed”. i just checked. females only, by virtue of being an ovarian operation. i stand corrected.
You’re right, Jackie: spaying is the removal of the womb and ovaries. So, yes, one would have to be very creative indeed to spay a bloke.
Alec, I know how annoying it can be when one makes an offhand remark in jest and is then pressed to explain the remark, but could you tell me the reference you’re making with your comic effort?
There’s no reference at all - it’s there because I put it there, so
that it plays in the mind of the audience, like a mariner’s sounding
to provide feedback upon the environment.
If you seek evidence of anti-German bias or somesuch deleterious lack
of openmindedness, may I offer the observation that of the past three
summers I’ve spent a week of each in small hotels with upwards of 40
German bikers, and yet I obtained my recent broken leg by messing up a
sweeping left-hand bend in France.
Mind you, that’s not to say I wasn’t shocked by the politics of some
of my friends - British *and* German as discovered over considerable
amounts of Kronenbourg, and in the latter sadly often couched in
considerable amounts of denial; but if I held that against them I
would not be riding with them, let alone consuming pannier space to
deliver Twining’s Earl Grey teabags by motorcycle to Munich.
I’m happy that I don’t have to agree with people’s politics to like
the person, or to find them interesting. But I will take the piss out
of anyone, given the opportunity and apparent requirement.
I don’t think you’re anti-German! I just wonder what the Daily Mail is meant to have to do with Germany.
This is priceless Jackie, thank you for sharing it. I LOVE scrabble and the strangeness that almost always surrounds it.
One thing I’ve considered, more than once, is to record the date, players and words on the board of every scrabble game I play. I’m convinced that if I looked at it I could see where the relationships had been were and were heading with the people I was playing with by looking at the words we put out.
Tim, we keep track of every word made during each game, and I’m always coming across old score sheets…Maybe we should save them. Some of my favourite memories are Scrabble-related; playing during a torrential downpour in a bar in Brussels, playing outside a café in a square in Saint-Étienne and getting chatted up by Algerians who were deeply interested in our match, playing on every flight and Eurostar journey we’ve taken…We are very well-matched Scrabble partners; you never know who’s going to win, and most of our matches are very, very close (I beat him by the number of points he had left on his letter holder the other day). We’re very different players - he always makes at least one seven-letter word in a game, I rarely do - but I really am ruined for all other opponents now.
I consider it a victory if I manage to lose to Vic by fewer than a hundred points. She gets angry with herself for being so stupid if she only beats me by fifty or so.