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Like many people, we keep a grocery list on the refrigerator, adding to it as we need things. Unlike most people, though, all the items on our grocery list start with the same letter. It all started when one time, by pure chance, the first couple of items on the list started with the same letter. Whoever continued the list started manipulating the names of the rest of the items so that they continued the pattern. Thus was born our tradition: whatever letter starts the first item that happens to go on the list is the letter that must be used to start every other item.

For example, eggs have been, at various times, chicken eggs, poultry eggs, avian eggs, or ovoid eggs, depending on the initial letter (this last one is a little redundant, since the definition of ovoid is "egg shaped.") Milk has gone by such names as cow's milk, lowfat milk, one percent milk, bottles of milk, and, my personal favorite, bovine liquid. It makes for some interesting situations when one person is standing in the grocery store trying to figure out what an item that someone else added to the list is supposed to be.

As with many such traditions, there are rules, but the rules are simple: no manipulating the first item on the list to get the letter you want, and no repeating a modifier. For example, if you've used "bottle of dish detergent," you can't then use "bottle of cranberry juice."

Some letters are easier than others. We've discovered that 'C' is a pretty good letter; besides all the wonderful foods that start with 'C' (cheese, Cheerios, chicken, etc) there are lots of good adjectives and some useful container words, such as can or case. 'D' is a surprisingly hard letter, as we discovered when our recent holiday shopping list ended up starting with a 'D', and we had items on our list such as drops of chocolate (chocolate chips), dough flour: white, dairy sticks (butter), diamond-like crystals of sweetness (sugar), deciduous tree fruit pie (frozen apple pie), and dead chicken in shells (eggs).

For those of us who are writers or editors, in one way or another, words are our tools and anything we can do to sharpen the tools helps us. Wordplay such as this is a great way to increase our vocabulary and build our skills at using words in new and unusual ways. Many times we've had to consult a dictionary or thesaurus to come up with appropriate words, and creativity plays a big component as well. But more than anything, it's just a fun and silly tradition that we enjoy doing together as a family.

For those of you who love Scrabble, and are on social networks, may be interested to know that the official Scrabble game is coming this month to Facebook in the US and Canada, and is already on Pogo.com. It’s produced by Hasbro and Electronic Arts.

There’s no news yet as to what will happen to Scrabulous, the unofficial version of Scrabble that’s been on Facebook and has become very popular. Hasbro claimed it infringed on their trademarks, and wanted to shut it down, but realized they’d get a backlash if they did that without providing an alternative.

Thanks to Cynopsis Kids for the initial info. Read more on the complete story here.

Wordle is both a fun time waster for people who like words, and a useful tool for writers. You can upload any text you want into Wordle, and play with the fonts, colors, and layouts, and it will produce a picture based on the words, visually showing you the words you’ve used most frequently. The most frequently used words appear the largest. You can see where this can come in handy for fiction writers, especially, finding overused words, as well as themes, plot threads, etc that are used the most frequently throughout a book.

The results can be aesthetically pleasing as well as interesting and possibly useful. If you want to keep the image you’ve created just for yourself, don’t save it on Wordle. (Save it via an screenshot utility. You can also save it as a .pdf file; see Wordle’s FAQ for help.) Otherwise, anything you save will be available for anyone to print out or use. You might not want to do that with, say, your novel. On the other hand, I think it could make a small though neat promotional tool, especially if you save it under the book’s title and with your name. I saw a few on Wordle like that–and while I didn’t stay to peruse them, I did see the books’ titles–which is part of book promotion.

Thanks to Justine Larbalestier and her wonderful post on Wordle and how she used it for her novels, for introducing me to Wordle’s usefulness and fun play factor.

You need to have Java installed on your computer or your browser in order to view the Wordle creations.

Have you ever heard of the Carder Method for painting? If not I HIGHLY recommend you check out the site. It is an easy method to make really great, realistic still life paintings.

http://www.thecardermethod.com/clips/overview.html

I ran across it through an ad on someone elses site!

**Bearuh Blogger**