It’s A Mad Lib Life

         When I was a kid one of our favorite games was Mad Libs.  For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a series of writing tablet style books with a paragraph or two on each page, each page generally unrelated to each other, with words missing in the sentences.  The missing words are represented by a blank line with what type of word, such as noun or adjective, is missing written in small lettering underneath.  One person chooses a page and asks the other players for the words, without reading the paragraph to the group until all blanks are filled in.  The result is usually so funny that it’s tough to get through the whole paragraph without stopping to catch your breath.  This game is still one of my favorites to play with my brothers and their children.  One line that I still remember from when I was a kid and playing with my brothers is from “The Three Little Pigs”.  In this abbreviated version of the fairy tale the line “and he huffed and he puffed” ended up being replaced with “and he went and he gone”.  I can still see my brother Doug’s face turning beet red with tears streaming down his cheeks as we laughed until we couldn’t breathe and our bellies hurt.

         I’m noticing more and more that my conversations are getting to sound like Mad Libs.  I don’t know if it’s hearing loss, or people mumbling more or I’m just not paying attention but I’m hearing some pretty crazy sentences throughout my days.  I was talking on the phone to my sister-in-law who told me that she had just come in from working in the garden and had been attacked by a bunch of speedos. Wow! That produced some disturbing images until I stopped laughing and realized that she said a bunch of mosquitos.  Then there was the day at work when I was told that Linda dropped an eye in the pizza.  Ha ha! No, she dropped ice in the freezer.  Another time one of my coworkers, who is from another country and has a fairly pronounced accent said “I have no tongue, I need tongue”, we all looked at her in puzzlement so she repeated herself, “I have not thong, I need thong”, as we laughed and she repeated herself again and began making hand motions we realized that she wanted tongs to pick up the lettuce with on the salad bar.  It’s a good thing she likes us or I think she might have been angry.  I’m not going to get into the misheard song lyrics and don’t even get me started talking about those auto corrected text messages!  It’s getting to be a Mad Lib world.