Today is the birthday of Leonard B. Stern (1923-2011), American screenwriter, producer, and director.  Stern will probably be best remembered, however, as the co-creator of the game Mad Libs, the classic game where players insert randomly generated words into a passage based on the words’ parts of speech.

Stern’s love of words began with a humiliating experience in seventh grade.  After misspelling the word “hyperbole” in his class spelling bee, he was embarrassed beyond words.  Immediately, he ran home and located his family dictionary.  On that day the young Stern began to study the dictionary, determined to learn the correct spelling and exact meaning of as many words as possible (See February 4: Embarrassing Misspelling Day).

The story of the creation of Mad Libs begins in 1953 with two simple words:  “clumsy” and “naked.”  At the time Stern was working on a television script for Jackie Gleason’s pioneering television show The Honeymooners. One day Stern was sitting at his typewriter, searching his mind for a precise adjective to describe the nose of one of his characters.  When Stern’s best friend and fellow word-lover Roger Price showed up, Stern asked him for help, saying he needed an adjective.  Without waiting for any context, Price responded with two: “Clumsy and naked.”  When Stern began laughing, Price asked what was so funny.  Stern responded by saying that he now had an image in his mind of a  his character with a “clumsy, naked nose.”  At that moment the two friends realized that they had stumbled into something interesting; this bizarre juxtaposition of random parts of speech might just turn into something profitable.

The name of the game and its publication didn’t happen until five years later.  Sitting in a New York restaurant one morning in 1958, Stern and Price overheard a conversation between an actor and his agent.  The actor said he wanted to “ad-lib” an interview; the agent responded, saying that he would be “mad” to do it.  Stern and Price now had a name, Mad Libs, but no publisher.  Unable to find anyone to print their game, they decided to do it themselves, paying to have fourteen thousand copies printed.  To publicize the game, the creators arranged for it to be used for introducing guests on Steve Allen’s Sunday night television show.  Within three days of the game’s appearance on television, stores were sold out.  Soon Stern and Price joined forces with their friend Larry Sloan to form a publishing company called Price Stern Sloan (or PSS!).  Before long Mad Libs became a bestseller, and PSS! became the largest publisher on the West Coast (1).

Today’s Challenge:  Oh What Fun It Is to Eat an Angry Open Bucket

What is your favorite Christmas song or holiday-related story or poem?  To celebrate the holidays and the creation of Mad Libs, select a familiar Christmas carol or holiday story or poem. Take the text of your selected passage, and cross out 15-20 words — adjectives, nouns, and verbs.  As you cross out the words, create a list in order of the part of speech of each word you crossed out.  If a noun is plural, make sure to note that on your list; likewise, note the tense of verbs.  Next, using your list of parts of speech, have a friend generate a random list of words to match the parts of speech on your list.  Finally, insert these words into the text of your original text and read it aloud. Be prepared to laugh.  (Common Core Language 3 – Knowledge of Language)

1-Price, Roger and Leonard Stern.  The Best of Mad Libs:  50 Years of Mad Libs.  New York:  Price Stern Sloan, 2008.

On this day in 1932, the following list appeared in Time magazine under the title “The Ten Most Beautiful Words in the English Language”:

dawn, hush, lullaby, murmuring, tranquil, mist, luminous, chimes, golden, melody

The list was compiled by author and lexicographer Wilfred J. Funk (1883-1965), who was the president of Funk & Wagnalls, the publisher of the Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary.  

Funk was a lifelong proponent of vocabulary acquisition.  From 1945 to 1965, he prepared a monthly feature for Reader’s Digest called It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.  Funk’s Word Power quiz featured a collection of words united by a common theme and was one of the magazine’s most popular features.  When Funk died in 1965, his son Peter continued the feature, which became It Pays to ‘Enrich’ Your Word Power.

In 1942, Funk co-authored the book 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary.  The book was a wildly popular bestseller, leading the way for the numerous vocabulary building books and programs published today (1).

Today’s Challenge:  Words to Drop on Your Foot

What are some names of some concrete nouns — words that name tangible things, the kinds of things you can drop on your foot like a baseball, a paper clip, or an apple pie?  Learning a new word opens our eyes and our mind to the world and to the ideas around us.  This is especially true when we learn a new concrete noun.  A concrete noun is a name of a specific, tangible thing.  For example, what do you call the ball at the top of a flagpole?  It’s called a truck.

As writer Natalie Goldberg explains, concrete nouns help us learn the names of the things that surround us and help to better connect us to our world.  Imagine for example, you are out for a walk. Next, imagine you see a tree.  It’s not just a tree though because you know its specific name; it’s a “dogwood.” Knowing the names — the specific, concrete names of things – puts you in better touch with your environment and makes you more alert and awake (2).

Using a good dictionary, find 10 concrete nouns that you don’t know the definitions to.  Make sure that each word is a concrete noun, a tangible, specific thing that is not a proper noun.  For example, if you look up the following words, you’ll discover that each is a concrete noun that names something that is tangible enough to drop on your foot:

appaloosa, arbalest, arame, arrack, balalaika, capuche, demijohn, dromedary, ewer, farthingale

List your 10 concrete nouns in alphabetical order and follow each with its complete definition.  Do not include any (capitalized) proper nouns. (Common Core Language 3 – Knowledge of Language)

1- Lexicography:  Words That Sizzled. Time 11 June 1965.

2-Goldberg, Natalie.  Writing Down the Bones. Boston: Shambhala, 2005.

Today marks the anniversary of a tragic event that gave birth to the expression “drinking the Kool-Aid.”  People use this idiomatic expression today to negatively characterize someone who they feel is blindly and unthinkingly following a person or ideology.  As with many idiomatic expressions or dead metaphors (expressions that mean something different from the literal meaning of the individual words), most have forgotten the ghastly historical events that led to the phrase.

On November 18, 1978, 900 members of the Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church, formerly located in California, committed mass suicide at their Jonestown settlement in Guyana, South America.  Under the direction of their leader Reverend Jim Jones, the congregation, which included 300 children, drank a powdered soft drink laced with cyanide.  This tragic display of blind obedience to a cult leader was sparked by the visit of U.S Congressman Leo Ryan, who was investigating allegations of human rights abuses at Jonestown.  After ordering his gunmen to kill Ryan and a group of journalists who accompanied the congressman on the trip, Jones embarked on his final desperate act, ordering his followers to ingest the poison. Jones, himself, was found dead the next day of a self-inflicted gunshot wound (1).

Usually the exploration of the history or etymology of an idiomatic expression does not yield a specific known origin, much less a specific date as in “drink the Kool-Aid.”  Often an idiom’s origin derives from myth, folklore, literature, or legend, and often there are a number of competing stories behind the phrase’s origin.  For example, one idiom “the whole nine yards,” has several possible origins according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms:

the amount of cloth required to make a complete suit of clothes; the fully set sails of three-masted ship where each mast carries three yards, that is, spars, to support the sails; or the amount of cement (in cubic yards) contained in a cement mixer . . . . (2)

Today’s Challenge:  What’s the Story?

What origins of idiomatic expressions have you heard about, or what origins have you wondered about?  The list of expressions below all have their origins in a specific historical time period. select one, and do some research to find the story behind the idiom.  You may not be able to find a specific date, but you should be able to find a general time period from which the expression came.  Based on your research, write the story behind the expression as well as a brief explanation of the expression’s meaning as it is used today.

cross the Rubicon, jump the shark, push the envelope, a Pyrrhic victory, read the riot act, red tape, turn a blind eye, voted off the island (Common Core Language 3 – Knowledge of Language)

1-Higgins, Chris. The 35^th Anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre. Mental Floss.com 8 Nov. 2012. http://mentalfloss.com/article/13015/jonestown-massacre-terrifying-origin-drinking-kool-aid.

2-Ammer, Christine. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms.

New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003: 713.

On this day in 1983, retired Navy commander Meredith G. Williams (1924-2012) won a “create a new word” contest run by the Washington Post.  Williams’ winning neologism was “backronym” which he defined as the “same as an acronym, except that the words were chosen to fit the letters.”

An example of a backronym is the Apgar score, a rating scale used to evaluate the health of newborn babies.  The test was named for its creator, Virginia Apgar.  Then, years later it became the backronym APGAR, a mnemonic device to help its users remember the test’s key variables:  Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration (APGAR) (1).

So instead of beginning with the letters of already-existing words and phrases and making them into a word, as in the acronym RADAR (“Radio Detection and Ranging”), the creator of a backronym begins with a word and then creates a phrase to match the word’s letters.  For example, the backronym AMBER from the AMBER alert system was named for Amber Hagerman, who was abducted in Texas in 1996.  The official translation for AMBER was invented to fit the name: “America’s Missing:  Broadcast Emergency Response.”

Another example is the USA PATRIOT Act which was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. The complete translation of the act is  Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct  Terrorism Act of 2001.

Often backronyms are generated for humorous purposes, such as the Microsoft search engine Bing which some called the backronym “Because It’s Not Google,” or the automobile company Ford, which some claimed stood for “Fix Or Repair Daily.”

In 2010 NASA, an acronym for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, created a backronym for the treadmill it uses on the International Space Station.  In honor of comedian Stephen Colbert, the T-2 treadmill became the COLBERT: Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (2).

Today’s Challenge:  Bring Home the Backronyms

What backronym would you create for a proper noun — the name of a company, a geographic place name, or the last name of a person?  Just as Meredith G. Williams participated in a neologism contest, hold your own backronym contest.  Use existing names of people, places, or companies to create backronyms that are funny or serious. (Common Core Language 3 – Knowledge of Language)

1- Dickson, Paul.  Authorisms:  Words Wrought by Writers.  New York:  Bloomsbury, 2014:  26.

2-NASA. Colbert Ready for Serious Exercise. 5 May 2009. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/behindscenes/colberttreadmill.html.