Why I can’t win at Scrabble.

My husband has a crazy-huge vocabulary. Lately, he’s been making stuff up right and left, and seeing whether I believe it’s a word. For example, the other day we were at Chick-fil-A, working on our books, and I said I wanted to throw all my short stories into a little book and put it out for people, and he said no, those are incunabula. I said, “Gesundheit.” Then he showed me that’s really a word, and I used it in my post on the subject. A few days later, he said sheesh-meesh means “bat” (the flying animal) in Slovene. I said “no way am I believing that.” I looked it up on Google translate, and it came up as “netopir.” He said, “Oh, it must be Croatian I’m thinking of.” I said sure it was, and checked. But “šišmiš” popped up. He saw my face, started laughing, and laughed harder when I kept pressing the sound button to make the deep voice say, “SHEESHMEESH” a dozen times. Then tonight, he was talking about “Loop-garoos.” The kids didn’t believe that was really the French for “werewolf,” but I held back judgment based on the “lup” root (lupine, you know). Finally, he said he was going out to buy some “Eclairpses.” I was scared to ask, but did anyway. He said, “Oh, you know what those are.” I shook my head. He looked surprised. “Of course, they’re the custard-filled, chocolate topped pastry you buy on the weekend of the eclipse.” Oy!