Words played in this game
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I think what @Mistertoad is referring to is the new list that appears below the game board when viewing one of your completed games under 'My Stats'. You can keep scrolling down the page for all the definitions.
Some of the definitions are still questionable though as it doesn't seem to prioritize the most common usage. I guess it's interesting finding out other meanings for certain words.
Example: I played ZOMBIE last game. Apparently it's 'A snake god of voodoo cults in West Africa, Haiti, and the southern United States.' Now how many people use it in that context? There are way better examples than that but you get the idea.
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@dan
Not so. The list appears for the current game.
Nothing wrong with the word definitions provided by Lexulous. The word 'zombie' was given it's original (correct!) definition before it was 'Disneyfied' by Walt. Thus:
"In the old voodoo religions of Western Africa, there was a snake god named the zombi. There was a general theme of similar words in the Bantu family; in various cultures, words emerged like zumbi ("fetish", the idol type), nzambi, ("god") and eventually zombie, still referring to the snake god.
Later, when some of these Western Africans were taken to the Caribbean as slaves, they brought their language with them, and it mixed with Spanish and other tongues, especially in Haitian creole, where zombie ("god") and the Spanish word sombra ("ghost") kind of fused to form zombie ("ghost god", or, more accurately, "reanimated person", since they were basically synonymous). This idea of the dead rising from the grave was too tempting for Hollywood to pass up (it was first used in the 1932 film White Zombie), so the word wormed its way into our pop culture to be ingrained in the nightmares of children forever."
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@mistertoad Thanks for the info. That was a poor example on my part.
As for the list, perhaps what I'm seeing under my completed live game is showing up for you during an email game?
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@dan
There is a case for saying that a 'zombie' is an insulting way to refer to somewhat who appears to be sleepwalking through life, someone who is a bit of a dummy. That seems to be how the word has evolved from it's origins as "Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magic like voodoo". The WIKI page is fascinating!
The point is that there is no single definition of any word. Nor should there be ...
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
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@dan - Yes, the list appears during email games which are the only ones I play. I'm slow and old as Ben Finegold GM says.
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This post is deleted!
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@thatguythere202 - I was lying. I use a Fax machine.
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@mistertoad Hah! I use carrier pigeons.
(but the real-world me uses a desktop too; presumably the reason I don't see the list you mention is that I am playing in real-time, not e-mail)
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@mistertoad That's a rather sweeping statement: "No single definition for a word nor should there ever be". Perhaps medical and other scientific terminology should be excluded from that view???
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Yes, you are right and I withdraw my conjecture. I got carried away by my own rhetoric. Otherwise I would have settled for "Many words can have many different plausible definitions".
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S sakamvari locked this topic on
