My BFF Jen has often said her favorite incarnation of me is "Punchy Joyce". As you might imagine, Punchy Joyce comes out only after 11pm and is when I'm really tired and quite silly. These days Punchy Joyce comes out around 8:30....she is funny -- keep this in mind because it does relate to the story I'm about to tell you.
Last week, while at the home of High Mater and Pater Familus, Big James wanted to play a game of scrabble. You can probably already tell where this is headed, as yours truly and her spouse are not the best spellers in the world. In fact, I have a deep and enduring testimony that spell check was invented just for me. You will also remember the Boggle incident of 2007 as well. We don't play no word games good!
I have also long been of the opinion that word games such as Scrabble and Boggle should just be played for fun and the John Bishop rule should always be used. Who is John Bishop and what is is rule? I will tell you. John Bishop, and all of the other Bishop family lived across from us on Macdonald street when we were wee little things. One summer the Bishops came up to the Ranch with us, and of course so did the Boggle set. We were all out on the screen porch playing said Boggle game when John came up with the words boffy and geelof. Since then boffy and geelof have been an integral part of all our vocabularies. But, boffy and geelof are not words you say. No, they are not, hence the John Bishop rule: "if you can make up a good enough definition and get the majority of the players to agree on that definition, it is a new word and counts for points". Hours of hilarity have ensued from that simple rule -- not to mention strange words. Flurgenhaffen anyone?
I also have to mention here at BYU there was an open Scrabble game every night at the Hammock House, which was as the name might imply a house with a hammock on the front porch. These guys were serious players. The one time I went over to play and I saw them pull out the dictionary -- the Scrabble players dictionary no less, I knew this was the not Scrabble game for me, because I knew there would be no John Bishop rule.
Back to Friday night. We all sat down at the table. Joseph and I decided to partner. What's worse than one person who cannot spell, but two persons who cannot spell, who are new parents and are really tired! We drew tiles. Of course Joseph and I got all consonants plus Q, ya that's right the letter Q. At this point punchy Joyce came out -- as did Cheap Drunk Joseph, who is very closely related to Punchy Joyce. I proclaimed, "Look, we should play Polish Scrabble with these letters!" It was bad -- Joseph and I could not stop laughing at ourselves and our crappy letters. Then Dad joined in. He and James were putting up words like antidisestablishmentarianism and so on. Come to find out as well, I've been spelling 'loser' wrong for years. I guess that's why I'm a 'looser' when it comes to word games. Joseph and I did manage to get a few gems in like: fun, cat, box, vat...and you see the pattern here...Polish Scrabble on the short bus.
In the end Joseph and I stopped drawing tiles because we were so busy laughing at our words and how stupid we all were. Of course Dad or James won, but it didn't really matter, because we knew the winners wouldn't be us.
