Word Games.

Few words can express a shear moment. That is why in my family, we find words and phrases that sum things up and butcher them to be our own. These magical singulars and pieces of prose seem to capture a moment perfectly. One such word is schlagened. As teens, my brother and I used to play a German computer game that had no English in it whatsoever. One day while playing, one of us beat the other severely. On the mock up newspaper the word "Schlagen!" appeared on the headline. I don't know who started it, but I think it was my brother who proclaimed, "I Schlagened you!". This became a common family phrase whenever anyone in my family beat someone else, Whether it be in cards, board games or video games. We couldn't simply use the German word. We had to add it to our family dictionary by changing it, so we gave it a tense of our own.

While playing a board game the other night, I schlagened the kids. Of course I vocalized it and though my kids have heard it before, Emily could not resist to ask, "What the heck does schlagened mean?". Being that my brother and I made the word up, I was qualified to answer this. I told her, "Schlagen is a German word for to beat, schlagened is our own word for, beat you beyond recognition and as I said a few minutes ago, I schlagened you at the game.", O.K., it may not have been the most mature thing to say, but it was appropriate for the moment.

To make things more interesting, before we play a game, you will hear a phrase like, " I will smiten you.", not smitten, not smite, smiten [smahyt-n], we needed a more dramatic word, so we made one up.

The last word for today that I have taken from the family dictionary is a hybrid acronym/word. It is actually neither an acronym nor a word, but I think you'll get the point. During a card game, my mother made an extremely foolish move. My brother-in-law (Yes, even in-laws get to add to our language.), who was on her team exclaimed, "Don't be an N.H..". He repeated the saying again and my sister had to find out what it meant. So she asked, "What is an N.H.". My brother-in-law quickly answered, "Knuckle Head.", of course my family couldn't let that go, so he got lambasted with, "[KaNuckle Head]?", for quite some time. After all of the razzing though, he now has an entry that is used quite often.

I'd like to say these were the only examples of our language, but unfortunately, I could write a supplemental dictionary. My father and I play with prefixes and suffixes on words all of the time and it usually is dispretty.

I guess we are just a bunch of N.H.s.