The Waiting Game Sucks; Let's Play "Hungry Hungry Hippos"!

This evening I played a board game (Balderdash if you care). One of the benefits of the commercial game is supposed to be that the words were selected for their obscurity. There are even provisions in the rules for when more than one player knows a word's meaning. I've taken this to mean that there oughtn't be many words I know. And except for one word in a game twelve years ago, this has been so.

Until this evening. This evening, in two games, five words came up that were well-known among us:

· topiary

· sebum

· proboscis

· mickle

· spelunker

Since the words are supposed to be obscure, it seems like five in two games is more than there should have been. And I wonder if it's because of words being better known now than 17 years ago when I got the game, because the makers' criteria for obscurity were looser than they should have been, because my friends are unusually well-read, or because the makers felt like throwing in some easier ones for the sake of I don't know what (it doesn't do a lot for game play when many people know the definition).

Still, vastly more words were unfamiliar, and plenty of proposed definitions were marvellously hilarious.