Is this not how everyone else plays?

My friend Liz has a YouTube series called How To Liz, in which she plays a character named Liz.*

I went on HowToLiz this week, though, to teach her how to play Words With Friends:



I think "defenestrate" made me crack because I had just sat in on Molly's Latin class, in which she taught some third graders about cognates of fenestra (window).

In real life, Liz usually beats me at Facebook's Words With Friends, which is essentially online Scrabble. I forget about playing on tiles that are worth lots of points and just focus on making any ol' word.

Liz's version is actually kind of hard. It makes me think of the improv game, "Malapropism," in which you point to things and say what they're not. It stretches a muscle in your brain that's easy to neglect -- the muscle of naming what is possible instead of what is obvious. That is a particular strength of Liz's.


*It's a little like how Stephen Colbert plays a character named Stephen Colbert, except that Liz hasn't bought a SuperPAC. If she did -- she does know about politics -- she would probably spend most of the PAC money on temporary tattoos.