I learn new words from my daughter all the time. Lit for example means cool or excited (I think). I’m pretty sure fire means something similar though I’m not completely sure.
For the past four days I’ve been visiting my mother at her snowbird house in Arizona. My twin sister is also visiting and my 19-year-old daughter came over from college in Colorado.
When we’re not eating, sleeping, hiking, horseback riding, shopping or sitting on the patio in the sun, we’re playing Scrabble or Bananagrams. Sometimes we even play Bananagrams while sitting outside in the patio in the sun.
My daughter has always been a fast processer and Bananagrams is where she really shines. She has been that way since she was 6 years old. She called me recently from college and said, “Mom, I think I’ll have to marry the first guy who beats me at Bananagrams.” Whenever my daughter or I suggest the idea of playing Bananagrams with my mother, she makes a prune shape with her lips. She’s very competitive and knows that she’ll likely never beat my daughter (or me) at this fast-paced word game.
But during the last few family visits my mother has come around to joining Bananagrams and it always ends up being fun. For an 83-year-old, she’s amazing.
My mother is a voracious reader and regularly throws out words I haven’t heard. Though I’m not sure she’s conscious of it, whenever one of my sisters or I don’t recognize a word she says, she lifts her eyebrows, aghast at our ignorance and says something shaming like, “You don’t know what _______ means?”
Scrabble is the one place language-wise where I can beat my mother. I might not know as many words as she knows, but the way my brain works, I can find clever places for words on the Scrabble board and I’m strategic in placing my words on squares that will multiply my score.
I’m good at placement and strategy, but my daughter is a master. This trip, she’s hammered her elders (by a significant margin) every single game we’ve played.
Last night the three of us were playing our umpteenth game of Scrabble. As usual, as soon as my mom picked her starting tiles she shared what bad letters she had. She was preparing us for the idea that she wouldn’t win this game but that it wouldn’t be her fault because of her terrible letters.
My mom always keeps the score. She’s competitive enough to be very conscientious and never forgets to double-check people’s counts and jot down the score on the scratch papers that she saves so she can look at the before the next game.
Last night there were several words that either my daughter or I used that my mother questioned. Muds was one of them. Capturing a triple word opportunitiy, my daughter added as ‘s’ to ‘mud’ to rack up 18 points. “That’s not a word,” my mother said quickly, a little too aggressively. My daughter insisted that it was and I agreed.
“I think it is,” I said, “like, ‘I bathed in the muds of the river.’”
“You can challenge me,” my daughter said, already comfortably in the lead and not worried about losing a turn.
My mom opened her Scrabble dictionary, carefully licking her finger as she turned through the thin pages to find ‘mud.’ My mom found it and her lips turned in a sharp upside down grin. “It is a Scrabble word,” my mom said, glaring at my daughter as she playfully slammed down the dictionary. I took my turn, my mom missed her next go, and we continued the game.
There were several other words that either my daughter and I used — sixer, pac, dal, snogs, zee, git, jeep, flabs , um— that my mother questioned but didn’t want to challenge for fear of losing another game. Instead, she jotted the words at the top of score sheet. At the end of the game, we waitedd patiently as Mom carefully looked up every word to see if they were indeed real words. To her chagrin, they were all legitimate Scrabble words.
Last night, towards the end of the game, my mom put down, doyens. “What does doyens mean?” I asked my mom. “Do you mean docent?”
“Nooooooo,” my mom said righteously, “Doyens is a distinguished older person.” Cool, I thought to myself, I never knew that word. My daughter, engrossed in her phone when not crushing us, didn’t even look up to learn this new word that she’ll probably never use in her future vocabulary.
We’ll play Scrabble and Bananagrams again before we all part ways tomorrow night, probably several times. It’s the perfect way to socialize, and connect without getting too close which my mom isn’t great at.
I can see that playing Scrabble is a vehicle for a level of intimacy my mother can handle. And I love how much my mother loves Scrabble, even if it is motivated in part by her fiercely competitive nature. And I love to watch my daughter light up when she finds the perfect space for a word with a ‘q’ or an ‘j.’ It’s fun for me to watch them together. I can sink into the background as I watch the young lioness build her chops and the old master slowing down, but still sharp.
Scrabble was invented in 1938 which means that my mother’s mother might have played, but that her mother, my great-grandmother, probably didn’t. It’s unlikely that epigenetics played into the Scrabble skills of these three generations of mine. It must be something deeper in our DNA, some specific helix that directs how words are processed.
Of course, nurture is part of it too. There’s no doubt that my daughter’s prowess is partially due to how technology has trained her brain to be multi-focused and fast-paced. And I’m sure my mother has a disadvantage with the natural changes of her aging brain, as do I.
I don’t fully understand this genetic proclivity for Scrabble and wordsmithing that women in my family are born with and in the end that’s not important.
What matters is that we mostly have fun. We have a way to sit down and spend time together. Yes, there is teasing and sometimes people are too competitive, but we’re also together — three generations sharing how their brains work.
I hope one day to be a grandmother myself, that my daughter will pass on the Scrabble skill to future generations. Maybe she’ll marry someone who can beat her and they’ll have a daughter who will love Scrabble too. Maybe one day my granddaughter will crush me at Scrabble. I hope so. I can only dream.