By Staff
Leada DeVaney, Editor
Each year around the holidays, my family ends up sitting around the dining room table and playing a game of Scattergories. Scattergories, in case you are unaware, is a game where you have a list of categories, such as boy's names and items you can find in a refrigerator, and a dice with different letters on it. You roll the dice, and according to what letter you land on, you have one minute to come up with words that start with that letter for each category.
The interesting part is you have to come up with a word no one else is using, so you want to use something unusual.
Simple, right? It is. The problem starts because we end up making up words and then getting all hot and bothered because someone calls us on it.
Basically, we cheat.
If we question my dad on a word, he says it's from the country and we're just city kids and don't know any better.
My mother will say her odd words are medical terms and she can look them up if we need her to but we're really bad children if we question our very own mother.
As for me, I specialize in weird words, prompting me to keep a dictionary in my lap as we played this weekend. I had to look up "inchworm" at one point, just to prove I was correct.
I was. And everyone else had to listen to at least a minute of inchworm-in-your-face taunting.
Sometimes, we get so tickled at our answers that we can't even read them out loud, such as when I answered "Snark" for an animal starting with "S." My reasoning was that any animal mentioned in a Dr. Seuss book should at least count in Scattergories, but I was voted down.
Things got even funnier when my grandmother, who was playing her first game of Scattergories, had the greatest all time answer.
The letter was "K" and the category was "Bible characters."
A Bible character who's name starts with K? Surely there was a Kabbakuh or Koel? Something. We couldn't think of anything.
None of us had an answer, except for my grandmother. After all, she's been reading the Bible longer than any of us at the table and even attended Southeastern Bible College. If anyone knew a Bible character who's name started with "K" she would.
We were wrong.
Her answer? King Tut.
"King Tut?" my sister yelled. "He's not in the Bible. There's King David, King Saul, and King of Kings, but I'm pretty sure there's no King Tut in the Bible."
"There's not?" she asked. "Well there should be."
We gave her the points. Creativity still counts for something in our family.