There Are Seven Letters in Wavicle

On Mother’s Day yesterday, Caitlin and Shannon cooked me a wonderful dinner:  beet salad, braised chicken with olives and capers, and molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.  And they indulged me by playing four games of Scrabble.  They have both gotten good enough now that they are perfectly capable of trouncing me at the game, and are much less likely to be cowed by my knowing smile when they consider challenging a word I’ve played.

I learned Scrabble during long wintery Indiana evenings from my Mom and Dad, who were both excellent players.  My Dad’s strategy was setting himself up to play bingos (using all 7 tiles at once for 50 extra points).  My Mom’s strategy was short, tight plays leveraging high scoring tiles on triple score squares.  My Dad’s plays opened up the board, and my Mom’s plays closed the board right back up again.  I tripped along behind both of them, grasping at any and all opportunities that presented themselves along the way.  The best part was looking up a word I’d challenged and discovering I was right.

When you look up a word, there’s an irresistible urge to peruse adjacent words in the dictionary (if you love words the way we do).  That’s how Shannon discovered a very good word last night while looking up my play of “waver” (which he was sure had to have an i in it, despite my knowing smile):

Wavicle:  a subatomic particle that can act like both a wave and a particle.

And, as it happens, a 7-letter word.