The alphabet game revisited

From time to time, I have reported on playing the alphabet game, usually as a device to get myself to sleep. The idea being to run through the alphabet, in the usual order, coming up for each letter with a member of the chosen category which starts with that letter. The category might be, to give a few examples, British seaside towns, French towns, countries of the world or extant (as opposed to extinct) mammals. So the start of a British seaside town game might go: Appledore, Bangor, Conway, Dover, Eastbourne. For more material on this, see references 2 and 3.

For the curious, Appledore is a town in North Devon, once a serious ship building place, still home to the dockyard snapped above.

One variation is to allow repeats, so that when one first arrives at a letter you have to give a member for that letter. But for your next move, you can either give another member for the same letter, or move onto the next letter. And there have been plenty of other variations over the years.

The idea is to get to the end of the alphabet without any long pauses, preferably without breaking rhythm, and without making any mistakes. Which last might be using the wrong letter or using a word which was not a member of the chosen category. So an example of the latter would be ‘Alberta’ when playing the country game, with Alberta being a province but not a country. While Africa is a continent. And sometimes one just gets stuck, it taking a few seconds before play resumes. The mind sort of gets stuck, or gets into a loop. Or the mind just wanders off somewhere else, sometimes a sign that one is close to falling asleep.

One can play the alphabet game out loud, or silently. In the first case, it is only what one utters that counts. In the second case, there are degrees of silence: one might more or less fully articulate the word, but without getting as far as sound – or one might somehow say the word far deeper in the mind, without the speech muscles being consciously involved at all. Ideally, in this second case, mistakes should not arrive in consciousness at all. So the word ‘Africa’ popping into mind would count as a mistake, even in the case that the popping was more a case of hearing the word than saying it.

An alternative rule would be that one articulated if not said the right words at a steady, reasonably slow pace, and stray words arriving very faintly in the intervals, just for inspection as it were, did not count. So if one was saying ‘Conway’ when playing the British seaside town variant, it would be OK if ‘Derby’ made it to consciousness, well before the next town was due, provided, of course, that it was rejected and went no further.

But early this morning, I thought that all this might better be considered as a single continuum. Consider that case that a word arrived in consciousness and was well on the way to being uttered before the brain put the brakes on. With the result that there was a rather strangled, rather mumbled utterance. Possibly not strangled or mumbled enough that a careful auditor would not be able to work out what the word was to have been. So ‘saying or not saying’ is not a clean, binary dichotomy. Saying or just thinking is not. Thinking or not thinking is not, with at the margin, it being very hard to say afterwards whether a word made it to consciousness or not at the time in question. I associate to the common locution ‘it’s just on the tip of my tongue’, used when one thinks that the right word or name is very close to popping out. That the mind has nearly got hold of it.

Which last point might cause some dispute. Some might argue that a word either makes it to consciousness or it does not. And they might deploy reams of paper from electroencephalogram machines and lots of statistics to prove their point.

Similar issues arise at reference 1 where I pondered a bit about positive aspects of talking rubbish.

I need to resume silent play to investigate the matter more thoroughly.

PS: slightly startled to find that it is two years or more since I was playing this game regularly, with it starting around five years ago if reference 4 is anything to go by. My first guesses at when something or other happened to me are getting very unreliable.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/talking-rubbish.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/xenarthra.html. 

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/more-animal-game.html. 

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/05/new-game.html. 

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-video-games-of-south-korea-and.html. Entertained by coming across and re-reading this one in the margins. I also see that I almost fell for the MIT Technology Review back in 2019, actually falling for it two years later in 2021, as noticed at reference 6 below. Good content, but rather too many emails.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/axioms-fall.html.