I Have 24 Hours Left to Live

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24 hours, beach, Charlotte's Web, college, cupcakes, harry connick jr., ice cream, journal, Last day on earth, life, life choices, music, musings, reality, Scrabble, somersault, students, writing, writing course

What would you do if you only had 24 hours remaining on this earth?

Yesterday, I posed this question to my writing students and asked them to write on it for six minutes. The catch was they had to focus their responses around their chosen topic for the semester. One student called out, “If I had 24 hours left, I wouldn’t waste it on my Topic!” Cue laughter.

This semester, my students’ writings focus on one Topic of their choosing. The Topic has to do with their “reality.” Reality is a broad concept, so we assessed and discussed what it is and what might be the reality in each individual life. After thoughtful and critical analysis, some chose topics relating to their college majors (nursing, medicine, engineering), other chose themes around religion or science, several chose sports, a few chose relationships (healthy, abuse, love) and one even picked a tangible item (a diesel truck).

I begin each of my writing classes with a free writing component, intended to give students more insight on their Topic of reality. What color represents your Topic? If your Topic were an animal, what would it be? How different is your Topic today than 25 years ago? While they responded to yesterday’s question, it gave me time to reflect on what I might do with one final day.

Since I don’t have a Topic, I had freedom to wander in my thoughts. I stayed away from the more depressing options (saying goodbyes, final hugs and all that). These were my first 10 initial ideas for my final 24 hours:

1. Reread Charlotte’s Web.
2. Dance to my favorite song list.
3. Send a tweet to Harry Connick, Jr., letting him know we could have been great together.
4. Eat ice cream and several cupcakes.
5. Turn a somersault on the grass in the backyard.
6. Drive to the beach and put my toes in the sand and water.
7. Ceremoniously burn all my “skinny” clothes I was never going to fit again into anyway.
8. Drink a really good bottle of Italian red wine.
9. Play a game of Scrabble (on the board, not my phone).
10. Add a final entry to my journal.

What would you do if you had 24 hours left to live?

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What’s the Word?

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Angry Birds, brainiac, Candy Crush, dictionary, English language, games, Global Language Monitor, guess, musings, Oxford English Dictionary, Red Stone, Scrabble, Scrabble Teacher, thesaurus, words, Words with Friends, Zoon

I’ll probably alienate a lot of people right off the bat, but I have to say I’ve never played Candy Crush, Angry Birds or Red Stone and most likely never will. I’m more a word game geek. Right now, I have several Words with Friends and Scrabble games on going.

By no means does that imply I’m a word expert or brainiac. There are many times I play a word only to have the Scrabble Teacher feature grimly appear with the “Uh-oh, here’s what you missed” thought bubble. He then shows me a word I’ve never heard of that generates 10, 20 or 85 more points than what I placed. I feel a teensy bit better knowing I didn’t actually miss that higher point score because I never had the word in me to begin with.

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Aside from the 101 two-letter words available (does everyone know xu or qi are acceptable words?), sometimes I’ll place letters and press play, hoping the game will accept what I think is gibberish. When the word sticks, I gladly take those points. Just this week, I was at a loss and placed ZOON across a triple word square to receive 106 points – my highest to date. I confessed my guess to my opponent. My nephew then let me in on one of his secrets: Guessing keeps me alive in this game.

The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), there are 1,019,729 words in the English language. GLM further states the average high-school educated English speaker knows about 45,000 words (as high as 60,000 when including proper names and foreign words). It’s safe to say I’ll never use all the words available in the English language.

Yesterday I looked up zoon. Unless I’m writing an article for Biology Today, I probably won’t need ZOON again anytime soon – until the next Scrabble game, that is.

Zoon: noun, 1. Any of the individuals of a compound organism. 2. Any individual, or the individuals collectively, produced from a single egg.