7-Letter Sunday: RETAINS

At first glance, retains is a rather boring word. It basically means to have, to keep, to hold onto. You can retain a deed to a property, a fact in your head, or a lawyer by paying him a fee (called, of course, a retainer). In this photo, the wall retains the soil behind it:

"Redi-Rock-retaining-walls-Mid-Hudson-Con" (CC BY 2.0) by  redirockphotodatabase 

It originates in the Latin re (back) + tenere (to hold). That led to the old French retenir and then in turn to Middle English reteynen, which became our word, retain.

For Scrabble fans, though, retains is a bit magical, for two reasons. First, it's one of the easier 7-letter words to find on your rack, since all of its letters are very common ones. If you find yourself with a rack full of low-scoring letters, take a quick glance to see if RETAINS is lurking.

Second, it has the most anagrams of any 7-letter Scrabble word -- eight other words! This gives you lots of options to maximize your score when playing these letters, or to get a bingo on the board at all when things start to crowd up.

Thus, it's good to take a look at the anagrams of RETAINS. Most competitive Scrabble players know these by heart:

• ANESTRI - periods of sexual dormancy; plural of ANESTRUS
• ANTSIER - comparative of ANTSY; even more jittery or hyper
• NASTIER - even more mean or hostile
• RATINES - RATINE is a heavy, loosely woven fabric; RATINES is the plural
• RETINAS - the RETINA is a part of the eye; RETINAS is the plural
• RETSINA - an alcoholic drink in Greece; a resin-flavored wine
  
  
  "Athens :: Retsina Malmatina" (CC BY 2.0) by  tomislavmedak 
  
• STAINER - a person or a thing that stains
• STEARIN - the solid part of an animal or vegetable fat

This is an excellent list to retain in your memory!

Mundane Monday: KILL

For a mundane word, kill actually packs in a lot of drama. First, there's the obvious meaning: to cause the death of someone or something. Can't get much more dramatic than that.

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by  wackystuff 
 

But then there are the many other meanings that draw from this primary one. For example, you can "kill" a piece of legislation, a running engine, a newspaper story, or a bottle of liquor.

Then there is the dramatic hyperboles -- a standup comedian "kills" when he does really well. The world of online marketing is full of advertisements for programs, software, and secret formulas that let you "kill it" in internet sales.

On the home front, a parent may tell a whining child, "You're killing me!" -- and days later the child tells the parent the same thing when she is told to take a bath. Of course, neither person literally thinks that they are going to die from whining or bathing.

Kill has a specific meaning in sports as well. In tennis or volleyball (or, I think, pretty much any sport that involves hitting a ball (or other object like a birdie) back and forth) a "kill" is when one player hits the ball (or other object) so hard that the opponent has no chance of returning it.

As a noun, "kill" can be both single and plural: a single deer or shot-down plane is a "kill", but so is the total number of (usually) animals hunted or destroyed by pollution - a fish kill, the overall deer kill in a hunting season.

Kill comes from Middle English kullen or killen, which in turn comes from Old English cyllan. Cyllan, in turn, comes from the older word cwellan, which also gives us the English word "quell". Interestingly, quell takes us right back to the meanings of kill that imply stopping -- killing legislation or an engine. Language is so cool!

Even cooler, there is an entirely different and unrelated meaning for kill as a noun -- a stream or inlet, which comes from the Dutch word kil, which also means inlet. You see it most often as part of place names in the areas of the northeastern United States where the Dutch settled--Peekskill, Catskill, Schuykill. These names all have to do with the geography and nothing at all to do with death and violence.

As a Scrabble word (I'm just going to stop saying "Scrabble or Words With Friends" all the time, okay? Just assume I mean both when I say Scrabble) KILL isn't all that exciting. It does have the usual set of extensions like KILLS, KILLER, KILLING, etc. There is even the adjective KILLABLE.

But when you dig into the other unrelated words that begin with KILL, you find some useful "secret weapon" words to have in your game vocabulary, such as:

• KILLDEE or
• KILLDEER (a type of bird)
• KILLICK or
• KILLOCK (a small anchor)
• KILLIE (a type of fish)

not to mention the delightful KILLJOY which is a 7-letter word (bingo!) and which can really rack up the points if played across high-scoring board squares, as it includes both a 10-point and 5-point letter.

"Killdeer - Charadrius vociferus" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by  Mechanoid Dolly 

Any of these lesser known extensions can be added to an opponent's use of KILL; moreover "kil" or "kill" can be added to the front of commonly played words like DEE, DEER, LICK, LOCK, LIE, and JOY.

Truly a killer word to have in your arsenal!

7-Letter Sunday: BHANGRA

Why 7-letter Sunday and not six letters or 13 letters? Because in Scrabble and Words With Friends, a rack of tiles is 7 letters. If you can make and play a word using up all your letters, you get a bonus (50 points in Scrabble, 35 in WWF). If you can play one of these words (Scrabblers call it a "bingo") over double or triple word scores, you can really rack up the points!

So 7-letter words are of particular interest to word game players. Plus, there's the whole alliteration thing with seven and Sunday!

Today's word is bhangra. It is an Indian word that has been adopted into English to describe a style of music and dance that comes from the Punjab region in India. The music tends to be lively and bouncy and in recent years has come to embrace everything from traditional Punjabi folk music to combinations with Western style pop, dance and hip hop music.

Bhangra dancing is also very lively and has become popular all over the world through Bollywood movies, dance competitions and exhibitions in the Indian diaspora communities around the globe, and most recently, in combination with exercise in workout classes and videos!

This video is for a Punjabi pop song and showcases bhangra music as well as bhangra dancing:



Thanks to Netflix, I've become more and more of a Bollywood fan in the last few years and particularly enjoy the fluffier romance and comedy movies that almost always feature multiple song and dance numbers. Bhangra music is energizing and fun to listen to, and just as hip hop has infiltrated the bhangra sound, I'm also tickled to recognize bhangra beats and samples in Western hip hop and dance music as well.

I didn't know about the bhangra dance competitions before researching this post, but I will definitely be watching for any that happen locally -- here in the Atlanta area we have a very large Indian community so I'm sure there are performances and competitions happening locally. Now I know to watch for them!

One more note on a Scrabble/WWF perspective -- players love to have words in their vocabulary that contain smaller, more common words within them so that you can add on letters to make a longer word, possibly reaching a high-scoring square on the board in the process. Bhangra has the word "hang" in the middle of it. Your opponent may expect a word like "hangs" or "hanger" -- but turning "hang" into "bhangra" will be a mind-blower!