On my all too infrequent visits home, one of my very favorite things to do is play Scrabble with my mom. I always end up with what seems like a reasonable score, but lose horribly, because Mom has mastered the trick of playing a long word such that it lays across another, creating a ridiculous number of two-letter "words." I put "words" in quotes here, because serious Scrabble players do not limit themselves to living lexemes; anything that can be mined from the Scrabble dictionary is fair game, and if you want to get good, you really have to memorize all of the legal two-letter plays.
There are a lot of Scrabble words I've picked up over the years of getting my ass handed to me by my dear mother. One of the things I love about them is that they exist only in the Scrabble universe; I've never had the opportunity to use the word "ope," "oe" or "crwths." My favorite such term is "aa," which means (according to the dictionary entry I memorized after having challenged Mom's use of the word several times) "a rough, cindery ash." In German, incidentally, it means "poop." Of all the crazy Scrabble words I learned, "aa" has always been the one I've wished I could meet in the wild, but I've never encountered it and was never entirely sure how I might use it.
Until today.
The caption to the above picture, which I found via Neatorama is as follows:
12 (E-5). Accretionary lava ball comes to rest on the grass after rolling off the top of an ‘a‘a flow in Royal Gardens subdivision.
There it is! Aa in the wild! I thought this day would never come.
Related bonus material:
(Photograph taken by J.D. Griggs for the US Geographical Survey (link). Comic by the incomparable Randall Munroe.)
hahahahah, I so understand...
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