This past weekend, I was at a friend's apartment engaging in a game called "Circle of Death". This game is played with a deck of cards and a beverage of choice. The cards are fanned out face-down around the "community" beverage (I never said this was a sanitary game) and each player takes his turn choosing a card. Each card signifies something to do. For example, 10 is "Categories". So, the person who drew that card would come up with a category, such as clothing designers, and the person to his or her left would have to name something in this category, and play would continue around the circle until someone could not come up with anything in that category. The person who could not come up with anything would have to take a swig of his or her beverage of choice.
One of my favorite cards is the king. When a king is drawn, the person who drew that card gets to make up a rule that everyone else has to follow. These can get pretty creative, and adds some fun to the game.
In this particular game that I was playing, the person who drew a king made a rule that no one could use pronouns. There was general acknowledgement around the circle that this was the new rule, and anyone who broke the rule would have to drink.
Play was about to continue when someone asked, "Wait, what's a pronoun?" Someone else replied, "You know, things like 'he,' 'she' and 'it'."
But apparently everyone thought this was an exhaustive list because the next person to go said "OK, my turn!"
I told that person to drink, and everyone around the circle stared at me like I was crazy. I politely pointed out that he had used the word "my", which is a pronoun. After some protest on their part, I convinced everyone that "my" was indeed a pronoun.
Once we had that settled, someone wanted to resume play, so he said, "OK, your turn." Again, I pointed out that this person needed to drink, because "your" is also a pronoun.
They weren't having it this time. They said it wasn't fair, because there were too many pronouns, and they couldn't possibly know them all. At this point, I would have whipped out my "When Words Collide" book and flipped to page 32, but I didn't have it with me, and I probably would have been ridiculed for it if I did.
Despite my protests, the rule was amended to include only "he," "she" and "it," and all future rules involving grammar were banned from the game.
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I totally understand how you feel when your friends just dont understand grammar and how you always must fight the urge to correct them. I was teaching my boyfriend the difference between a gerund and a participle at dinner the other night and he looked at me like I was a complete nerd. Oh well, such is life when you are a news editing nerd.
ReplyDeleteTwo terms I didn't expect to use in the same sentence: grammar and drinking game. Couldn't you and your friends just play Scrabble?
ReplyDeleteI have also attempted to play circle of death with the no pronouns rule, and the definition of a pronoun had to be explained. At least people can speak and make logical sense (most of the time) without knowing the vocabulary behind the parts of speech.
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