After last weekend’s NFL football games I now can say that I officially know some people who are famous. Not that you’ll ever see the names Marti and Roger Lawton in People magazine, but they are famous none-the-less.
Because everybody has heard of some sports fan who has given up on their team’s chances in a game and left the game early—only to hear later on that they had left a game that was one of the most thrilling come-from behind victories in playoff history.
Well that’s what Marti and Roger did. I can’t say as I blame them though. I was listening to the game on the radio and had given up on the Seahawks too. The Green Bay Packers had taken a 19-7 lead by the end of the third quarter and the score was still 19-7 with five minutes left to play. That was about five minutes after Marti and Roger had left the stadium. Seattle finally won it in overtime by a score of 28-22.
My giving up on the Seahawks just meant turning off the radio though. For my friends it meant paying to travel clear across the country to make the bad decision to go back to the motel early.
Could you imagine making the commitment and spending the cash and then missing one of the biggest moments in your team’s history?
One friend told me that Marti and Roger aren’t true Seahawks fans. “The 12 never leave the game early,” is what he said.
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I came across the term paradigm shift this week. To me the word paradigm seems such an excellent one for that particular definition. Words ending in “gm” are pretty rare, so seeing a word that ends in such unique combination of letters seems apropos to the definition.
I didn’t actually go through the entire dictionary to look for “gm”-ending words. I didn’t have to because someone has already done it for us. This is what comes from giving too much computer power to a very bored individual. Either that or it was part of a university research grant.
Anyhow, you can now go online and have a computer program produce lists of words using the letters you designate—where you want them in the word too. So I asked for “gm” at the end and came up with fewer words than you can count on one hand.
In fact, there are fewer than that when you consider paradigm and diaphragm are the only two you are ever likely to use. There is also something called an apophthegm, which is defined as a short, pithy and instructive saying; a terse remark, conveying some important truth. So that makes it a nifty word in my book. But certainly not one you are likely to ever see in this newspaper again.
Then there is an apothegm, but that word doesn’t really rate being counted as the fourth word ending in “gm” because it means the same thing as apophthegm.
I did find a good “gm” word for this week though. It doesn’t end in “gm” but it’s a cool word anyway. Whigmaleerie is the word and it comes along just in time for Robbie Burns Day.
It’s a Scottish word meaning an odd or fanciful contrivance. We’ll see everyone at the Legion on Saturday night for some haggis and whigmaleerie.
