One More Word And You’re Done!

(My story involves a party game called “Bag of Nouns.” Everyone puts five nouns on five strips of paper and all the papers go into a bag. Teams are optional. The game has three rounds: the first round, you say whatever you can to get your group to guess the noun you drew from the bag and get through as many nouns as you can in a minute. At the end of each turn, all the strips of paper go back into the bag, so very quickly certain nouns become familiar through repetition. The second round is same idea, except you get ONE WORD to describe what’s on the paper, so you’d better hope the nouns you draw on your turn are familiar ones, or that someone in your group will figure out one of their nouns that hasn’t been drawn yet. If you screw up and say, “um,” then you’ve used your one word for that noun, and you’d better hope your team can guess from nothing. The third round is charades. We are on the second round, and a friend’s guest gets to go first.)

Friend: *to guest in question* “Okay, second round. You get just one word per noun that you draw. You can say that word over and over, but you cannot say any other words, not even ‘uh’ or ‘um.'”

Guest: “Okay.” *draws from bag, looks at it* “Right, so, this is a thing where—”

Friend: “—no. One word.” *everyone agrees to give her another shot, since she clearly missed something* “Okay, so if the noun you drew was, say, ‘car,’ you could say, ‘drive,’ or maybe, ‘traffic,’ but nothing else. If the noun you drew came up a lot in the previous round, try to pick a word from those turns to describe it that your team would recognize. Okay?”

Guest: “Yeah, got it.”

Friend: “Great. Draw again.”

Guest: *draws, looks* “Um, so, these are given when—”

Friend: “—no. Stop. Okay. So, for example, the one you drew that time was ‘Finals.’ You could say, ‘test,’ or, ‘college,’ and when that word came up in the first round, ‘stress’ was focused on a lot, so you could use ‘stress’ or something. But no other words. No sentences. No descriptions. One word for the noun you drew, and then your team has to guess based on that one word.”

Guest: *pauses* “Sure.” *draws again, looks at paper* “This is something that—”

Friend: “—yeah, okay, your turn’s over. Next person!”

(She never seemed to really understand the rule, but she also never seemed to understand that she was missing anything.)