Month: August 2023

To help us put names with faces, I have included in this post pictures of all of you in sections 19 and 20 with picture captions that list your names. I encourage you to review this page frequently. In between the pictures, I have included lists of first names that are also common nouns, making them playable in Scrabble.

• Al: a type of East Indian tree
• Alan: a breed of hunting dog (also aland, alant)
• Alec: a herring
• Ana: a collection of miscellany about a specific topic
• Anna: a former Indian coin
• Barbie: a barbecue
• Belle: a pretty woman
• Ben: an inner room
• Benny: an amphetamine pill
• Bertha: a style of wide collar
• Beth: a Hebrew letter
• Biff: to hit
• Bill: to charge for goods
• Billy: a short club
• Bo: a friend
• Bobby: a policeman
• Bonnie: pretty (also bonny)
• Brad: a small nail or tack
• Brock: a badger

• Carl: a peasant or manual laborer (also carle)
• Carol: to sing merrily
• Celeste: a percussive keyboard instrument (also celesta)
• Chad: a scrap of paper
• Charlie: a fool
• Chevy: to chase (also chivy)
• Christie: a type of turn in skiing (also christy)
• Clarence: and enclosed carriage
• Dagwood: a large, stuffed sandwich
• Daphne: a flowering shrub with poisonous berries
• Davy: a safety lamp
• Deb: a debutante
• Devon: a breed of cattle
• Dexter: located to the right
• Dom: a title given to some monks
• Don: to put on a piece of clothing
• Donna: an Italian wo woman of repute
• Erica: a shrub of the heath family

• Fay: to join together closely
• Florence: a former European gold coin
• Franklin: a nonnoble medieval English landowner
• Fritz: a nonworking or semi-functioning state
• Gilbert: a unit of magneto-motive force
• Gilly: to transport on a type of train car
• Graham: whole-wheat flour
• Hank: to secure a sail
• Henry: a unit of electric inductance
• Herby: full of herbs
• Jack: to hoist with a type of lever
• Jacky: a sailor
• Jake: okay, satisfactory
• Jane: a girl or woman
• Jay: any of various birds, known for their crests and shrill calls
• Jean: denim
• Jenny: a female donkey
• Jerry: a German soldier
• Jess: to fasten a strap around the leg of a bird in falconry (also Jesse)

• Jill: a unit of measure equal to to 1/4 of a pint
• Jimmy: to pry open
• Joannes: a Portugese coin (also johannes)
• Joe: a fellow
• Joey: a young kangaroo
• John: a toilet
• Johnny: a hospital gown
• Jones: a strong desire
• Josh: to tease
• Kelly: a bright shade of green
• Kelvin: a unit of absolute temperature
• Ken: to know
• Kent: past tense of ken
• Kerry: a breed of cattle
• Kris: a curved dagger
• Lars: plural of lar: a type of ancient Roman guardian deity (also lares)
• Lassie: a lass
• Laura: an aggregation of hermitages used by monks
• Laurel: to crown one’s head with a wreath
• Lee: to shelter from the wind
• Louie: a lieutenant
• Louis: a former gold coin of France worth twenty francs

• Marcel: to make waves in the hair using a special iron
• Marge: a margin
• Mark: a line, figure, or symbol
• Martin: any type of the bird also known as a swallow
• Marvy: marvelous
• Matilda (a hobo’s bundle (chiefly Australian)
• Matt: to put a dull finish on (also matte)
• Maxwell: a unit of magnetic flux
• Mel: honey
• Merle: a blackbird
• Mickey: a drugged drink
• Mike: a microphone (also mic)
• Milt: to fertilize with fish sperm
• Minny: a minnow
• Mo: a moment
• Molly: a type of tropical fish
• Morgan: a unit of frequency in genetics
• Morris: a type of folk dance from England
• Morse: describing a type of code made of long and short signals
• Mort: a note sounded in hunting to announce the death of prey

• Nelson: a type of wrestling hold
• Newton: the unit of force required to accelerate one kilogram of mass on meter per second
• Nick: to make a shallow cut
• Norm: a standard
• Pam: the name of the jack of clubs in some card games
• Parker: one who parks a motorized vehicle
• Peter: to lessen gradually
• Pia: a fine membrane of the brain and spinal cord
• Randy: sexually excited
• Regina: a queen
• Rex: a king
• Rick: to stack, hay, corn, or straw
• Roger: the pirate flag

• Sal: salt
• Sally: to make a brief trip or a sudden start
• Sawyer: one who saws wood
• Shawn: past tense of show
• Sheila: a girl or young woman
• Sol: the fifth note on a diatonic scale (also so)
• Sonny: a boy or young man
• Sophy: a former Persian ruler
• Spencer: a type of sail
• Tad: a young boy
• Tammie: a fabric used in linings (also tammy)
• Ted: to spread for drying
• Teddy: a woman’s one-piece undergarment
• Terry: a soft, absorbent type of cloth
• Tiffany: a thin, mesh fabric
• Timothy: a Eurasian grass used for grazing

• Toby: a drinking mug in the shape of a man or a man’s face
• Tod: a British unit of weight for wool equal to twenty-eight pounds
• Tom: the male of various animals
• Tommy: a loaf or chunk of bread
• Tony: very stylish
• Vera: very
• Victoria: a light, four-wheeled carriage
• Warren: an area where rabbits live, or a crowded maze-like place
• Webster: one who weaves
• Will: to choose, decree, or induce to happen
• Willy: to clean fibers with a certain machine

Bonus Point Opportunity!

Students who correctly respond to the playable first names and last names question below will earn five bonus points for his/her/their second Check, Please! assignment.

How many students in English 1103.19 and 20 have a first and/or last name that is a playable Scrabble word?

Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer

1. Review the list of playable first names, compare it with the students’ first and last names in the photo captions above, or on the class page, and determine which of the students’ first and last names are playable in Scrabble.
2. Compose a response of one or more complete sentences that includes (1) the number of students with playable names, and (2) the first and last name of each student with a playable name.
3. Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 4 p.m. on Thursday, August 31.
4. To post your comment, click the title of the post, “What’s in a Name. . . . ,” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a white rectangular box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and hit return. Voila! You have submitted your answer. Good luck! I will make the comments visible before class on Friday, September 1.

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Next Up

Friday marks the second Wordplay Day of the semester. To prepare for class, review the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog–including this post–devoted to Scrabble tips.

Parallel play increases your score through the points you earn by spelling more than one word in a single turn. In the first play of the hypothetical game pictured above, the first player or team would score sixteen points by spelling enact with the t on the center double word square. With the second turn, the other player or team could take advantage of the opportunity for parallel play. If the team knew that aa is a type of lava, they could earn twenty-four points with four words: whoa, he, on, and aa.

Aa is one of sixteen playable two-letter words beginning with a. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.

• aa: a type of stony, rough lava
• ab: an abdominal muscle
• ad: an advertisement
• ae: one
• ag: agriculture
• ah: an exclamation
• ai: a three-toed sloth
• al: a type of East Indian tree
• am: the first-person singular present form of to be
• an: an indefinite article
• ar: the letter r
• as: similar to
• at: in the position of
• aw: an expression of sadness or protest
• ay: a vote in the affirmative (also aye)

Important Note about Challenges

The game rules inside the Scrabble box top do not specify that a player or team that challenges a playable word will lose a turn, but David Bukszpan’s book Is That a Word? notes that the player or team does lose a turn. According to Bukszpan:

“[I]f a word is challenged and found not to be legal (called a phony in Scrabble parlance), the player that set it down loses a turn. Conversely, if a challenged word is found to be playable, the challenger loses his turn” (19).

Work Cited

Bukszapan, David. Is That a Word?: From AA to ZZZ, the Weird and Wonderful Language of SCRABBLE. Chronicle, 2012. p.19.

Coming Soon

At the beginning of class on Wednesday, August 30, I will collect your completed worksheet for Lesson One of the Check, Please! starter course. If you were absent yesterday, Wednesday, August 23, when I distributed worksheets or you misplaced your copy, you can download and print one from Blackboard.

College writing offers you the opportunity to develop skills, such as supporting arguments with evidence, writing effective thesis statements, and using transitions well, but it also gives you the opportunity to develop habits. Successful college students develop certain habits of mind, a way of approaching learning that leads to success.

In 2011, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP) identified eight habits of mind that successful college students adopt.

In class on Monday, we began an exercise in written reflection focusing on four of the eight habits of mind. Later in class today, we will begin writing about the four that you did not address in your writing on Monday. The paragraphs that follow include the descriptions of the habits that you examined (and the ones you will examine today), as well as the questions that you answered in writing (and the ones you will answer in writing today).

Curiosity

Are you the kind of person who always wants to know more? This habit of mind will serve you well in courses in which your curiosity about issues, problems, people, or policies can form the backbone of a writing project.

WRITING ACTIVITY: What are you most curious to learn about? What experiences have you had in which your curiosity has led you to an interesting discovery or to more questions?

Openness

Some people are more open than others to new ideas and experiences and new ways of thinking about the world. Being open to other perspectives and positions can help you to frame sound arguments and counterarguments and solve other college writing challenges in thoughtful ways.

WRITING ACTIVITY: In the family or the part of the world in which you grew up, did people tend to be very open, not open at all, or somewhere in the middle? Thinking about your own level of open-mindedness, reflect on how much or how little your own attitude toward a quality like openness is the result of the attitudes of the people around you.

Engagement

Successful college writers are involved in their own learning process. Students who are engaged put effort into their classes, knowing that they’ll get something out of their classes—something other than a grade. They participate in their own learning by planning, seeking feedback when they need to, and communicating with peers and professors to create their own success. Write about a few of the ways you try (or plan to try) to be involved in your own learning. What does engagement look like to you?

WRITING ACTIVITY: Write about a few of the ways you try (or plan to try) to be involved in your own learning. What does engagement look like to you?

Creativity

You may be thinking that you have to be an artist, poet, or musician to display creativity. Not so. Scientists use creativity every day in coming up with ways to investigate questions in their field. Engineers and technicians approach problem solving in creative ways. Retail managers use creativity in displaying merchandise and motivating their employees.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Think about the field you plan to enter. What forms might creativity take in that field?

Persistence

You are probably used to juggling long-term and short-term commitments—both in school and in your everyday life. Paying attention to your commitments and being persistent enough to see them through, even when the commitments are challenging, are good indicators that you will be successful in college.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Describe a time when you faced and overcame an obstacle in an academic setting. What did you learn from that experience?

Responsibility

College will require you to be responsible in way you may not have had to be before. Two responsibilities you will face as an academic writer are to represent the ideas of others fairly and to give credit to writers whose ideas and language you borrow for your own purposes.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Why do you think academic responsibility is important? What kind of experience have you already had with this kind of responsibility?

Flexibility

Would your friends say you are the kind of person who can just “go with the flow”? Do you adapt easily to changing situations? If so, you will find college easier, especially college writing. When you find, for example, that you’ve written a draft that doesn’t address the right audience or that your peer review group doesn’t understand at all, you will be able to adapt. Being flexible enough to adapt to the demands of different writing projects is an important habit of mind.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Describe a situation in which you’ve had to make changes based on a situation you couldn’t control. Did you do so easily or with difficulty?

Metacognition (Reflection)

As a learner, you have probably been asked to think back on a learning experience and comment on what went well or not well, what you learned or what you wished you had learned, or what decisions you made or didn’t make. Writers who reflect on their own processes and decisions are better able to transfer writing skills to future assignments.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Reflect on your many experiences as a writer. What was your most satisfying experience as a writer?  What made it so?

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Next Up

Friday marks the first Wordplay Day of the semester. To prepare for class, review the Scrabble Ground Rules posted in Blackboard, as well as the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also, look for a Scrabble tips posts on my blog. Most weeks of the semester, I will publish a post devoted to Scrabble strategies.