>I see no point in guessing the results of new words

The purpose I had in mind for this game is threefold:

1. To have fun!

2. To see how clever we can be in coming up with Okrandesque puns, even if they aren't the puns that Marc Okrand ends up using.

3. We could also play competitively -- multiple players coming up with lists of predictions, and seeing who got the most right/the highest score.

The guesses/non-canon words could be scored according to how close they were once the real qep'a' word list is revealed. The exact right wordform would be worth 3 points. If someone got the basic word right but the wrong wordFORM -- in matters of where the glottal stops go, whether the pun-source word is truncated, forward vs. backward, etc., it would be worth 2 points. And if someone guessed the source of a pun right but chose a different word than what Marc turned out to choose , it would be worth 1 point. (For example, in the last qep'a', the word for "feldspar" was *moqlam* -- a reference to Craig Feldspar from Malcolm in the Middle. If someone had guessed *Qegh* for "feldspar", s/he would score 1 point on that word.)

To prevent third-party list members from accidentally misremembering the wrong guesses (which will probably be most of the guesses) as the canon words, the "players" could privately send their lists to me instead of posting them publicly, and I would do the counting/scoring in such a method of gameplay.

>and strongly

>discourage sending such a list full of non-canon words.

We don't jave to send our lists of non-canon speculation in to Marc Okrand. Although if he saw such a list AFTER the new words were revealed, I think he may be mildly amused.

I have posted here before about dreams I have had wherein new words were revealed (or, as in the case of my insect words dream, created but then withheld from us). One dream was about Marc Okrand revealing new words for diseases like AIDS and syphilis (and the word for AIDS referenced the musical RENT). I have also had a dream wherein I created a whole bunch of Klingon words for mammals we didn't have yet and put them up on a webpage. (There were three words for kinds of chipmunk-like creatures from Kronos in this dream, one a braggart, one brainy, and one that loves food, and the words for these species of chipmunkoids were based on Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.) Should people not post about such dreams they had if imaginary non-canon words appeared in the dream?

>It has happened

>before that someone didn't read the entire message and accidentally

>assumed it was a new word.

Are you talking about *'I'* (the word for "armpit")?

Well, from the looks of things, this isn't going to become an annual activity on tlhingan-hol@lists.kli.org.