On a recent WordPlay day, a student remarked that he was unfamiliar with the word nth, which is used to describe an unspecified number. Learning nth and other all-consonant words that follow will enable you to continue the game when you’re faced with a rack without vowels.
brr: used to indicate that one is cold
crwth: an ancient stringed instrument (pl. -s)
cwm: a cirque (a deep, steepwalled basin on a mountain, pl. -s, prounounced to rhyme with “boom”)
hm: used to express thoughtful consideration (also “hmm“)
mm: used to express assent or satisfaction
nth: describing an unspecified number in a series
phpht: used as an expression of mild anger or annoyance (also “pht“)
psst: used to attract someone’s attention
sh: used to urge silence (also “shh” and “sha“)
tsk: to utter an exclamation of annoyance (-ed, -ing, -s)
tsktsk: to “tsk” (-ed, -ing, -s)
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
Today’s class will be devoted to planning and preparing for your group presentation:
As an exercise in reviewing one of the lessons in the Check, Please! course and as an exercise in collaboration and oral communication, you and two or three of your classmates will deliver a concise and engaging presentation that addresses the most significant points covered in one of the five lessons in the Check, Please! Course. (You will receive your specific group assignments this morning in class.)
DIRECTIONS FOR PLANNING
Plan a presentation of five to ten minutes that addresses the most significant points covered in your group’s designated lesson in the Check, Please! course. (See pages 2-3 for the lists of groups and lesson assignments)
Include in your presentation (a) an opening in which you state each member’s first and last name, (b) a close examination of one segment of the lesson, and (c) a conclusion that provides closure and invites questions.
You are encouraged but not required to address how the lesson has been relevant to your other work in English 1103 an/or your other courses.
DIRECTIONS FOR REHEARSING
In preparation for rehearsing, write your notes on an index card. If your initial notes are written in complete sentences, rewrite them to include only words and short phrases for your key points. If your notes are too detailed, you will risk relying too heavily on them and making minimal eye contact with the audience. Plan to make as much eye contact as possible and be sure to make eye contact with people throughout the room rather than fixing your eyes on one or two people.
Familiarize yourself with the presentation station. If you have not used the presentation station, I encourage you to devote part of today’s class period to familiarizing yourself with its setup.
Practice good posture. As you deliver your presentation, your ears should be directly above your shoulders. If you tend to shift your weight from one foot to the other—a distracting habit that’s sometimes called rocking the boat—stand with your feet perpendicular to each other. If you do so, you will not be able to shift your weight from one foot to the other.
Avoid filler words, such as uh, um, like, and you know. If you tend to use filler words, practice pausing at the points where you are likely to use fillers.
Take turns delivering your portions of the presentation, and offer feedback to your group members. Offer both suggestions for improvement and words of encouragement.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.
The assignments that I wrote as models for lessons one through five appear below. As you and your group members prepare for your presentation, you may find it helpful to review the sample assignment for your designated lesson.
Check, Please! Sample Assignment, Lesson One
In the first lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, introduces the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson one is what the author terms the Wikipedia Trick. Deleting everything that follows a website’s URL (including the slash), adding a space, typing “Wikipedia,” and hitting “enter” will yield the site’s Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia entry that appears at the top of the screen may indicate the source’s reliability or lack thereof.
The most memorable segment of lesson one is the short, riveting video “The Miseducation of Dylann Roof,” which begins with the narrator asking the question, “How does a child become a killer?” Produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it documents how algorithms can lead unskilled web searchers down paths of disinformation. In the worst cases, such as Roof’s, algorithms can lead searchers to the extremist propaganda of radical conspiracy theorists.
In the second lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, focuses on investigating a source, the second step in the SIFT approach that he introduces in lesson one.
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson two is Caulfield’s follow-up to the Wikipedia strategy that he outlines in the previous lesson. After he reviews that strategy, Caulfield explains how to use the control-f keyboard shortcut (command-f on a Mac). Typing control-f (or command-f) will open a small textbox in the upper right of the screen. Typing a word you are searching for will highlight the first appearance of the word in the text. Hitting return will highlight each subsequent appearance of the word.
Lesson two introduced me to fauxtire, a term for websites such as World News Daily Report, based in Tel Aviv, that present themselves as satirical but in fact serve primarily to perpetuate disinformation.
Perhaps the most memorable portion of lesson two was the side-by-side comparison of the websites for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. Though at first glance the two appear comparable, using the Wikipedia strategy reveals their profound differences. While AAP is the premiere authority on children’s health and well-being, ACP was founded to protest the adoption of children by single-sex couples and is widely viewed as a single-issue hate organization.
In the third lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, continues his instruction on the second step in four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source. Lesson three, “Further Investigation” covers these topics: (1) Just add Wikipedia for names and organizations, (2) Google Scholar searches for verifying expertise, (3) Google News searches for information about organizations and individuals, (4) the nature of state media and how to identify it, and (5) the difference between bias and agenda.
One of the most instructive parts of lesson three focuses on two news stories about MH17, Malyasia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger flight scheduled to land in Kuala Lumpur that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. While the second story, a television news segment, appears to present detailed investigative reporting challenging the conclusion of the Dutch Safety Board and Dutch-led joint investigation team–the conclusion that Russia was to blame–a quick just-add-Wikipedia check reveals that RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian state-controlled international TV network, a government propaganda tool rather than a source of fair and balanced news. The first video, the one produced by Business Insider, a financial and business news site, delivers accurate coverage of MH17.
Another notable segment of “Further Investigation” addresses the important distinction between “bias” and “agenda.” There, Caulfield observes that “[p]ersonal bias has real impacts. But bias isn’t agenda, and it’s agenda that should be your primary concern for quick checks,” adding that “[b]ias is about how people see things; agenda is about what a news or research organization is set up to do.”
In the fourth lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, focuses his instruction on the third step in the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source. Lesson four, “Find Trusted Coverage,” addresses these topics: (1) scanning Google News for relevant stories, (2) using known fact-checking sites, and (3) conducting a reverse-image search to find a relevant source for an image.
One of the concepts Caulfield introduces in lesson four is click restraint, which was given its name by Sam Wineberg, Professor of History and Education at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Maryland. Click Restraint is an activity that fact checkers practice regularly, but average people do not. Fact checkers resist the impulse to click on the first result, opting instead to scan multiple results to find one that combines trustworthiness and relevance.
Caulfield also considers the issue of false frames and offers as an example the miscaptioned photo of a young woman that circulated widely after the 2017 London Bridge attack. In the photo, the woman, who is wearing a hijab, is looking down at her phone as she walks past one of the victims lying by the side of the road, surrounded by members of the rescue team. Because the woman’s face is blurred, viewers of the miscaptioned picture cannot see the look of shock that is visible in her face in another image taken by the same photographer. Subsequently, her apparent lack of concern for the victim seems to confirm the caption in the infamous tweet.
Choosing a general search term over a specific one is a useful and unexpected tip Caulfield includes in his discussion of image searches. He explains that the benefit of such a bland term as “letter” or “photo” will prevent the confirmation bias that can lead to the proliferation of disinformation through false frames.
In the fifth lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, covers the final step in the five-step SIFT approach: “Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context.” Caulfield outlines the process of locating the original context as an antidote to the issues of accuracy that occur when information passes through intermediaries.
One of the most instructive portions of lesson five features a passage in which Caulfield cites a study of how stories evolve as gossip through the processes of leveling (stripping details), sharpening (adding or emphasizing details), and assimilating, which combines the two. In the process of assimilation “the details that were omitted and the details that were added or emphasized are chosen because they either fit what the speaker thinks is the main theme of the story, or what the speaker thinks the listener will be most interested in.” Similarly, leveling, sharpening, and assimilating all figure in the altered photographs and memes in lesson four. The abbreviated speech of the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, which omits commentary, inaccurately indicates a contradiction in his stance on the presence of guns in schools.
The image of photographer Kawika Singson with flames at his feet serves as an example of leveling. Although the flames are real, they were not caused by the heat of the lava flow where Singson stands with his tripod. Instead, to create the image, a friend of his poured accelerant on the lava before Singson stepped into the frame. The deception wasn’t intentional; Singson simply wanted the image for his Facebook cover photo.
Unlike Singson’s photograph, the altered photograph of the Notorious B.I.G. with Kurt Cobain was created with the intent to deceive. Cropping and merging the two photographs illustrates the assimilation process adopted by Photoshop users to appeal to music fans eager to think that such fictional meetings of icons took place. Krist Novoselic, who founded Nirvana with Cobain, replied to the is-it-real question with his own fake photo, making the claim that the hand holding the cigarettes was Shakur’s, that he had been cropped from the right.
This morning in class you will plan and draft a short midterm reflection essay that documents your work in the first half of the semester, focusing on what you consider your most significant achievements and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Features to consider include the following:
Planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative or your analysis
Keeping a journal
Completing Check, Please! assignments
Studying one of the readings examined class, including “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” “Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” “The School,” the sample literacy narrative (“A Bridge to Words”), or one of the sample analyses
Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
Playing Scrabble/Collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
Writing longhand
Limiting screen time
Focus on two, three, or four features of the course (but no more than four), and include in your reflective essay the following elements:
A title that offers a window into your reflection
An opening paragraph that introduces your focus and presents your thesis
Body paragraphs that offer concrete details from your work to support your thesis.
A relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or a relevant quotation from one of the texts that we have studied in class. Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation.
A conclusion that revisits the thesis without restating it verbatim
An MLA-style works cited entry for your source
Sample Works Cited Entries
Bartheleme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp.8-11.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.
—. “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expressive Writing, and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 5-8.
—. “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 124-25.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown, 2000. 166-73.
Next Up
Wednesday’s class will be devoted to planning and preparing for your group presentations on the Check, Please! course. At the beginning of the class period, you will receive your group assignments, including which of the five lessons will be the focus of your presentation.
If your midterm grade isn’t as high as you hoped it would be, keep in mind that many additional assignments–including the analysis that you just submitted–will factor in your final grade for the course.
The lists that follow present the midterm grade distribution, the combined distribution for sections nineteen and twenty, followed by the distribution for each section individually.
ENG 1103.19 and 20 Midterm Grade Distribution
A 3
A- 13
B+ 5
B 7
B- 3
C+ 3
C 1
C- 1
D- 1
F 2
ENG 1103.19
A 1
A- 6
B+ 4
B 4
C+ 2
C 1
C- 1
F 1
ENG 1103.20
A 2
A- 7
B+ 1
B 3
B- 3
C+ 1
D- 1
F 1
Next Up
Fall break! I look forward to seeing you back in class on Monday, October 16.
Today’s blog post is the final installment in the series of posts devoted to playable two-letter words. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the other two-letter words in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
qi: the central life force in Chinese culture (also ki)
re: a tone of the diatonic scale
sh: used to encourage silence
si: a tone of the diatonic scale (also ti)
so: a tone of the diatonic scale (also sol)
ta: an expression of thanks
ti: a tone of the diatonic scale
to: in the direction of
uh: used to express hesitation
um: used to express hesitation
un: one
up: to raise (-s, -ped, -ping)
us: a plural pronoun
ut: the musical tone C in the French solmization system, now replaced by do
we: a first-person plural pronoun
wo: woe
xi: a Greek letter
xu: a former monetary unit of Vietnam equal to one-hundreth of a dong (also sau pl. xu)
ya: you
ye: you
yo: an expression used to attract attention
za: pizza
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
This morning in class you will plan and draft a short reflective essay that documents your writing process and includes at least one relevant quotation from one of the sections of Writing Analytically devoted to analysis.
Sample Works Cited Entries for Writing Analytically
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.
—. “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expressive Writing, and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 5-8.
Questions to Consider in Your Reflection
What aspect of the writing seemed the most challenging? Choosing your topic? Deciding which text would serve as your subject? Determining your thesis? Identifying details to support your claims? Organizing the body of the essay? Composing the conclusion? Why did that aspect of the writing seem the most challenging?
Did the subject of your analysis change? If so, what was your original subject, and what did you change it to?
What do you consider the strongest element of your analysis?
At what point in the process did you decide on a title? Did you change the title during the writing process? If so, what was the original title?
What image that documents part of your writing process away from the screen did you include in your blog post? Why did you choose that particular image?
Up Next
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.
Draft collage with Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris and Bruce Dickinson (L-R) and an illustration of Gustave Dore’s edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
To offer you a second sample analysis, I have posted the essay that follows, one that I wrote as a model for my English literature students in 2020. “Rockin’ the Boat: Iron Maiden’s Metal Mariner” examines a heavy metal reimagining of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798, 1817).
Rockin the Boat: Iron Maiden’s Metal Mariner
A sailor kills a bird of good omen, his destructive act dooms his shipmates and curses him with retelling the tale over and over: So the story of the Ancient Mariner goes. Yet those plot details convey neither the epic nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem nor its influence on later writers. Only the poem itself places readers fully in the imaginative realm of the tale, but its late eighteenth-century diction creates a gulf between the poem and contemporary readers. Consequently, one of the challenges of introducing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to millennial students is bridging that gulf. Iron Maiden’s adaptation offers one solution. By eliminating the shifts in the narrative voice and updating the story with contemporary language, their heavy-metal version draws listeners into the story with emphatic rhythms that capture the spirit of the original lines.
Archaic words, such as “stoppeth” (line 2), have a way of stopping readers in their tracks, calling attention to their temporal distance from the poem. Along with the distancing effect of the language, the shifts from one speaker to another can pose problems for twenty-first century readers. Although the Mariner tells his own story, the first words that he speaks are in the fifth stanza. The four stanzas that precede his first words are voiced alternately by an unnamed narrator and the wedding guest who becomes the Mariner’s captive audience. In prose such shifts are easily navigated with paragraphing and dialogue tags. Most poems, however, lack such signals, and their absence in Coleridge’s poem compounds its difficulty. Not only are some of the words obstacles, it’s not always clear who is speaking them.
Iron Maiden’s adaptation eliminates those issues with updated diction and a consistent narrative voice. Rather than shifting speakers, Iron Maiden’s version presents the tale sung by a single storyteller, not the sailor himself, but a narrator who tells listeners to “[h]ear the rime of the ancient mariner” (1). Those first words of the song, penned by lead singer Bruce Dickinson, form an imperative sentence: a command with the understood subject “you”—“[You] hear the rime . . . ” (1). I am master and commander of this story, Dickinson seems to say, and you will hear it now. Such is the power of the imperative. Rather than leaving the reader questioning, as Coleridge’s first stanzas may, Iron Maiden’s song speaks directly to listeners, taking hold of them with the pull of a powerful tide, drawing them out to sea to witness the Mariner as he kills the albatross and seals his fate.
The nature of that fate, that the Mariner must tell his tale over and over, is effectively emphasized by the song’s repetition. The recurrence of the words “on and on,” which first appear to underscore the length of the voyage (17, 18) are repeated in the last line: “And the tale goes on and on and on” (89). That ending may be more fitting than the original. The “sadder and wiser” (624) listener at the end of Coleridge’s poem also appears in the last verse of the song. But by returning to the retelling of the story, the song’s ending shifts the focus from the wedding guest who hears the story only once to the teller who must tell it over and over.
Making the Mariner’s story more accessible through song is valuable not only as an introduction to the poem but also as a starting point for understanding its influence on later English writers, including Mary Shelley, the second-generation Romantic who featured both images and lines from the poem in her novel Frankenstein. Coleridge’s poem was one of Shelley’s favorites, one that she first encountered as a child when the poet recited it in her father’s study (Karbeiner xiii). Iron Maiden’s version captures the spirit of what Mary Shelley, Coleridge’s fan girl, heard: the epic ballad of an eighteenth-century rock star.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Romantic Period. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W. W. Norton, 2017. pp. 448-64.. EMI, 1984.
Iron Maiden. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Power Slave. EMI, 1984.
Karbeiner, Karen. Introduction: “Cursed Tellers, Compelling Tales—The Endurance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. 1818, 1831. Barnes and Noble, 2003.
The analysis that follows is one that I wrote as a model for my students in 2021. As you read it, note how I turn from summary to thesis (in bold) in the first paragraph. Also note how the paragraphs that follow offer support for the thesis with concrete details from the comic’s panels.
Since concluding paragraphs can be particularly difficult to write without repeating the introduction, today’s group work will include a close look at strategies for conclusions.
The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec
In Chapter 4 of Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus, he depicts his father Vladek’s account of the hangings of four Jewish merchants in Sosnowiec, Poland. Vladek and his wife, Anja, learn from Anja’s father, Mr. Zylberberg, that the Nazis have arrested his friend Nahum Cohn and his son. With his head bowed in sorrow, Mr. Zylberberg says to Anja and Vladek, “The Germans intend to make an example of them!” (83). That image of Mr. Zylberberg speaking with Vladek and Anja overlays the larger panel that dominates the page, one that depicts the horror that Mr. Zylberberg anticipates: the murder of his friend Nahum Cohn, Cohn’s son, and two other Jewish merchants. That haunting panel and the smaller ones that frame it illustrate the complexity of Spiegelman’s seemingly simple composition. His rendering of the panels of the living in conjunction with the fragmented panels of the hanged merchants simultaneously conveys connection and separation: both the grieving survivors’ ties to the dead and the hanged men’s objectification at the hands of the Nazis.
The placement of the overlaying panel not only hides part of the horror behind it, but it also connects Vladek’s father-in-law to one of the victims. Mr. Zylberberg’s head and torso appear directly above the suspended legs and feet of one of the hanged men, creating an image that merges the two.
Spiegelman further emphasizes the mourners’ identification with the hanged men by extending two of the nooses’ ropes upward to the smaller panel above them, linking the living to the dead. Additionally, Spiegelman underscores the link with Vladek’s line of narration at the bottom of the smaller panel: “I did much business with Cohn!” (83). The word “with” appears directly above the rope, punctuating the connection between both Nahum Cohn and his friend Mr. Zylberberg and Zylberberg’s son-in-law, Vladek.
While the panels of the hangings yoke the living to the dead, Spiegelman’s presentation of the hanged men in fragments also objectifies them. The final panels on the page depict only their shoes and part of their pant legs suspended above the onlookers, images that may evoke in some readers thoughts of the last remnants of the Jews who stepped barefoot into the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Whether the hanged men’s shoes call to mind those mountains of leather left behind by the Jews, the separation of their lower legs and feet from the rest of their bodies turns them into something less than human—not people, but mere parts. Thus, Spiegelman creates a picture of the hangings that illustrates both the mourners’ identification with the victims and the Nazis’ perception of the Jews as less than human: the malignant ideology that the artist has pinpointed “at the very heart of the killing project.”
Spiegelman, Art. Maus 1. Pantheon, 1986, p. 83.
Spiegelman’s transformation of the Nazi propaganda portrayals of Jews as rats remains an astounding achievement thirty-five years after the publication of the first volume of Maus. But seeing the hanged merchants in Modrzejowska Street in the midst of the George Floyd murder trial in Minneapolis and less than three months after the January 6 Capitol riot reminds readers that the panels of Spiegelman’s memoir have grown more prescient. The nooses evoke images of Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck, the January 6 chants to hang the Vice President, and a T-shirt glimpsed in the Capitol crowd, one with a Nazi eagle below the acronym “6MWE” (Six Million Wasn’t Enough), a reference to the numbers of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust. Our heads are bowed in sorrow with Mr. Zylberberg’s. The strange fruit of our past, both distant and recent, should seem far stranger.
After we examine “The Strange Fruit of Sosnowiec,” you and two or three of your classmates will collaborate on an exercise that asks you to consider an example of the connections and separations that I address in my thesis. The exercise will also ask you to explore the conclusion strategies that I employ in the final paragraph.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short reflective essay on your analysis. In your reflection, you will be required to include at least one relevant quotation from a section of Writing Analytically devoted to analysis: “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts” (4-5) or “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expresive Writing, and Argument” (5-8).
In the previous weeks, I published blog posts featuring the playable two-letter words that begin with a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, and l. Today’s post features the playable two-letter words beginning with m, n, o, and p. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the other two-letter words in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
M, by the way, is the most versatile consonant. In the first position, m pairs with every vowel: ma, me, mi, mo, mu, and also my. In the second position, m pairs with every vowel except i: am, em, om, um.
ma: a mother
me: a singular objective pronoun
mi: a tone of the diatonic scale
mm: an expression of assent
mo: a moment
mu: a Greek letter
my: a first-person possessive adjective
na: no, not
ne: born with the name of
no: a negative answer
nu: a Greek letter
od: a hypothetical force
oe: a whirlwind off the Faero Islands
of: originating from
oh: an exclamation of surprise
oi: an expression of dismay (also oy)
om: a sound used as a mantra
on: the batsman’s side in cricket
op: a style of abstract art dealing with optics
or: the heraldic color gold
os: a bone
ow: used to express pain
ox: a clumsy person
oy: an expression of dismay (also oi)
pa: a father
pe: a Hebrew letter
pi: a Greek letter
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
Jane Lucas 