Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Don't Jump

In my family, we love words, and we love playing, and so it follows that we love playing with words. Word games? Oh, yeah, bring it! Crosswords, Scrabble, Boggle, Up Words, Bananagrams, we never met one we didn't like. From puns to punctuation, this play often crosses over into our conversations-- a nice word for it might be "banter," but "bicker" wouldn't be inaccurate, either, and "argue" fits sometimes, too.

When my mother was visiting in June, she mentioned that she had read my blog entry for the day. "What'd you think?" I asked.

"I thought you should have used a semi-colon instead of a colon in one place," she answered. Rest assured that a lively debate ensued, and feel free to weigh in with your opinion (note the red text); it's how we entertain ourselves.

Today, when I picked up Treat and Josh from their photography class, Viva la Vida was on the radio. We batted around a few translations of the title, idly speculating about their meaning. "One thing's for sure," Treat said, "the members of Coldplay have no idea what it means."

"I understand if you don't like them," I said "but--"

"That doesn't give me the right to insult them?" interrupted Treat.

"Well, it might not give you reason to question their intelligence," I countered.

Treat elaborated on his opinion, adding that they were arrogant and self-important, and we let it drop. We were at his house by then, and he went inside to pack a lunch for hiking. On the way to our place, we teased him about whether his two boiled eggs and an apple would be enough for all of us.

"I can feed everyone with a single loaf of bread and a fish!" he assured us.

I looked at him in the rear-view mirror with raised eyebrow. "And you think Coldplay is self-important?" I asked.

"I don't know what you're talking about; I wasn't alluding to anything," he grinned innocently. "I was just envisioning a really, really big loaf of bread and a huge fish.

"Oh, I see," I replied. "Well, pardon me for jumping to allusions."

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