They say that Eskimos have like eleventy squillion words for snow and cold.
Today, you're banned from using any of them.
Your task: Write one vivid and evocative paragraph (not to exceed 150 words) depicting a man on the verge of freezing to death in the wilderness.
The catch: You cannot use any of the following words:
Cold, frozen, arctic, bitter, cool, freezing, frigid, frosty, glacial, ice-cold, icy, nipping, nippy, numb, numbing, polar, shivery, shiver, shivering, winter, wintry, subfreezing, subzero, zero, chill, chilled, cooled, frosted, iced, ice, snow, refrigerated, unheated
This is a judged round. Send your entries to edittorrent at gmail dot com. Entries will be posted anonymously on the 24th, and voting will remain open until just before the Closing Ceremonies. Have some fun with this one! Make us really shiver!
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10 comments:
Ooo, it's like a game of Taboo. I'm good at that game, but that awfully long list is going to make this a lot harder.
Jami G.
Then my nefarious scheme is working! Bwahahahaha!
Theresa
Had fun with this one. The things you learn in school can come in handy sometimes.
I notice that icicle is not the list, but I'm not using it because I suspect that's against the spirit of the rule. :)
Jami G.
I was never good at Taboo, but this was an interesting heat.
Brrr!
Clever! Great way to remind people that if you don't feel cold, that's when you're on the verge of freezing to death. Assuming you felt very cold just before that and have not changed environments, of course.
I decided to prep for this by spending 5 minutes on Write or Die just exploring my thoughts on cold. I think I used almost every word on your list !
Right, now to do it right.
I did mine last night, and found it more fun than I expected! I noticed that icicle wasn't on there, too, though I didn't use it. I did use a different word that wasn't on the list.
I can't wait to read everyone else's and see how they're different or similar to mine!
Katie,
Yeah, given Theresa's line:
They say that Eskimos have like eleventy squillion words for snow and cold. Today, you're banned from using any of them.
I figured the spirit of the rule wasn't to look for loopholes like 'icicle', 'shivered', 'numbed', 'nipped', etc., but to find ways to describe a scene without using any of the obvious descriptive words. :)
I think this is a great opportunity to see how our voice is unique. We're all given the same scenario and yet pushed to explore the boundaries of our vocabulary and innate sense of putting words together to form a mini-story.
If you couldn't tell, I loved this exercise. :)
Jami G.
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