The WLS office across the hall got me introduced me yesterday to
GoogleWhack. The game is to enter two words in Google that produce one and only one page as a search result. What counts as words is defined by what's in dictionary.com, which you can tell by whether or not the word is highlighted as a blue link at the top of your search results (on the light blue bar, at the far right). Googling "whacker tally", for example, is a legal attempted whack because both words show up in the search results; however, "whacker tally" at this moment brings up 1530 results, or 1529 too many to be an acktual whack. It's easy to come up with a two-word search that yields < 5 hits, and it's easy to come up with a search that yields 0 hits, but one and only one is harder (especially since the hit cannot be one of the various wordlists available on the net).
There are basically two different ways to play: the simpler way is to just use any two particular uncommon words without any thought about their relationship; the snootier way is to only use pairs of words that, taken together, are indeed meaningful. I played it the snootier way; it took maybe an hour to rack up ten whacks, all of which were adjective-noun pairings:
- grayish sphygmomanometer
- amaranthine sunfish
- fussbudget mallards
- puce bastinadoes
- abecedarian syllabuses
- cuckolded jaywalker
- contemptuous basenjis
- slithery bulrushes
- dilatory poetesses
- hemophiliac quislings
No I was not pleased with how many times I had to resort to pluralized nouns.
