When I was young, but not altogether so young, my friend Elena and I would play this spelling game where one person starts by calling out a letter, and the next person adds another letter, and the game progresses until the chain of letters spells a word; the person who adds the letter that completes the word loses.  We would play this when we were in restrictive circumstances – for instance, sitting in the “way back” of the station wagon on a trip out to Potomac Mills Mall – and had few other things to amuse ourselves with.  

 

Usually, this is how the game would play out each and every time:

 

One of us would start out with: J.

Then…A

Next…V

Inevitably…I

Triumphantly…E

Finally…R.

 

And we would spell out, responsively, again and again, JAVIER.  As in Javier Lopez, erstwhile catcher for the Atlanta Braves (duh), universally known for his hot ass.  (I should add that sometimes we would mix it up by spelling JAVY – his nickname, at least according to the baseball announcers on TBS.)  

 

Last night, reading a volume of Thurber (Alarms & Diversions), I discovered that this game has a name: Ghosts.  (Though serious practitioners generally don’t squeal out the same letters over and over.)  

 

But Ghosts is child’s play, according to Thurber.  The unidirectional accretion of letters is too simplistic.  He delivers the good news of a more engrossing variant: SuperGhosts.  In SuperGhosts, you can add a letter to the beginning or the end of the word-fragment in play.  I’ll let JT explain:

 

“If ‘busines’ comes to a player, he does not have to add the final ‘s’; he can put an ‘n’ in front, and the player who has to add the ‘e’ to ‘unbusinesslik’ becomes part of a ghost.”

 

By ‘part of a ghost’, Thurber is referring to the game’s win-loss tally.  Completing a word transforms you into a third of a ghost, and when you are three-thirds ghost, well, you are out, kiddo.  It’s prettier (at least, for me) to think that game was not named ‘Ghosts’ on account of this arcane scoring mechanism, but because the purpose of the game is to keep an array of possible words hovering like specters around the fragment.  With each additional letter, more of these spooks disperse, and when the word is finally resolved, one lucky ghost-word is embodied and the remainder are evicted.  Perhaps the one who adds the completing letter takes on the ghostly caucus of spurned words, and they steal a bit of his substance.

 

Part of what makes this game so excellent is that it is one of those rare diversions where the goal is the deferral of an outcome, rather than capturing, accumulating, or scoring.  But for me, the best thing about SuperGhosts is the linguistic juxtapositions it creates.  Obscure words and common words, archaic and everyday, words that are rarely associated, floating past and rubbing against each other.  SuperGhosts is a pastime that encourages the creation of wonderful lists.

 

JT munificently shares one with us: “On a recent night, tossing and spelling, I spent two hours hunting for another word besides ‘phlox’ that has ‘hlo’ in it.  I finally found seven: ‘matchlock,’ ‘decathlon,’ ‘pentathlon,’ ‘hydrochloric,’ ‘chlorine,’ ‘chloroform,’ and ‘monthlong.’  There are more than a dozen others, beginning with ‘phlo,’ but I had to look them up in the dictionary the next morning, and that doesn’t count.”  

 

SuperGhosts can be regarded as a sort of Oulipo exercise.  A player is asked to consider words in ways peripheral to their meanings, etymologies, and contexts, and instead to stroll haphazardly among the vagaries of spelling.  So, you, the solitary SuperGhosts player, can savor a delicious morsel the way an oyster savors the grain of sand that will form its pearl.  What is this jagged, unsayable hunk of letters the heart of?    

 

Here’s one I’ve been grappling with.  TK.  You use TK in articles when there’s a missing fact or section; it stands for “to come.”  (It’s editor-jargon, which always takes a sanguine delight in intentional misspellings -- like ‘graf’ and ‘lede.’)

 

So, here is my paltry list:

 

Latkes

Catkin

Pocketknife

Rat-king (kind of breaking the rules, I know; if you don’t know what a rat king is, you should look it up)

 

If there is a SuperGhosts adept out there who can think of any more, please let me know…