You Couldn't Miss With A Clue Like This

Beloved and I were playing Password with some dear friends and it was the boys vs the girls.

You remember Password, don't you? One player from both two-member teams is shown a word, then they take turns trying to get their team member to guess the word by giving one-word clues. (It's kind of like in high school when you try to deduce whether a particular girl will answer "yes" if you ever get up the courage to ask her out.)

Okay...it's not hardly like that at all.

It was my option whether to try to get my partner (who we'll call Rick, because that's his name) to guess the word on the first clue or to pass that first-clue opportunity to Beloved and her partner.

The word was mallet.

Now, the first word I thought of when I saw mallet was rubber...as in, "The television is acting wacky. Time to administer some percussive maintenance with a rubber mallet." The problem with that is, if I had decided to go first and just said rubber, Rick could not be reasonably expected to come up with mallet instead of ducky.

So, I passed the first-clue duty to Beloved, in hopes that she would say something like hammer or club, and her partner would say something like club or hammer, and I could wield the death blow on my turn by saying rubber.

Beloved thought for a moment, her face in a painful-looking grimace. Then she swallowed hard, squared her shoulders, looked her partner in the eyes, leaned slightly forward and calmly intoned, "Mallet."

It had been a while since any of us had laughed that hard.