I Got Sentenced

I have nerd friends, and I love them.

On December 31, 2011, a group of us got together for an evening of food and fun before ringing in 2012 at midnight. Part of our fun consisted of listening to the children complain that the adults were too loud (apparently, it was Opposite Day, and no one told me). The other part of our fun consisted of playing board games. Laughter and mayhem ensued, earning us stern talking-tos by the aforementioned, strangely perturbed children.

One of the games was “You’ve Been Sentenced.” In this game, each player receives 10 cards and must use these cards to build one sentence per round. There are five words or phrases on every card. A player’s task is to put together a real sentence and be able to defend its meaning to the rest of the players.

This game is a language nerd’s dream.

If one of you wants to buy me this game, I will not object. If you play it with me for hours on end, you will have my undying, variegated gratitude. That will flip my bangerang switch most assuredly, not to mention assuage my penchant for fiddling with language in the weirdest ways possible.

For posterity, I recorded a few of our sentences to share with you. Other than the challenge of building the sentences in the first place, the real creativity shone through as we defended our sentences to each other. Oh, the stories we told so that our sentences might serve as reasonable punchlines!

So, here are our sentences in all their (non-)sensible glory*. Borrow them for story ideas, if you like! I have the feeling there could be some story sparks in here. ; )

The squash kicked through the springs and slopped sentences.**

What if, presently, Americans under the outside pots liked to nose above the ground?

What if, early in the ’80s, Team Leader dumped orderly women on Houston?

Before the shocking trip to Jupiter, Tim gulped the merry-go-round color pink.

The slick, strong babysitter came to fake poisonings through the balanced diet.

Weirdly, Thomas Jefferson was saucing up Marie Antoinette until the blaster dangerously fired roughly.

From the kitchen: What did the licker Hippocrates break into?

Afterward, we decided that the advent of whale blubber was immediately preceded by an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

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*Believe it or not, no phonemes were harmed in the making of this blogpost.

**This might have been the most prophetic statement of 2011.