Despair drove me to find a better way to win - I was being trashed by my mother-in-law, and I wasn't enjoying it. She liked to drink when she played, and after her third bourbon her usual gentile southern lilt became a bitter trailer-park drawl accented with expletives.
I ended up playing this regular Wednesday night word game after an enjoyable dinner conversation about a weird incident on TV; a local gang had been tagging businesses with weird, seemingly random words - "defenestrate", "tintinnabulation", "mendaciousness". I had known a few of them and described their meanings, and I was surprised when my mother-in-law Betty chimed in with one I didn't know. "I should play you at words with friends!" I bleated like an idiot.
Pretty soon this was was my regular Wednesday event; both humiliating and awkward at the same time. I was trapped - my wife regularly commented how Betty loved our regular game, and how happy she was to see that we were getting on so well after the total apathy she'd greeted me with when we were first married. No way out.
It turned out Betty had been a reader's digest subscriber for over forty years, absorbing word games and crossword puzzles like a urinal absorbs the bitter remains of my morning coffee. She was kicking my ass, and not breaking a sweat. The worst part were the taunts: "If I'd known you were such an idiot, I'd never have let my daughter marry you". Once her few 'medicinal' drinks were down the hatch, the insults came thick and fast.
First I tried to learn my way out of it - picking up some basic two-letter words and keeping a dictionary nearby, but soon I pulled out the big guns - I found an online Words with friends cheat that kept me locked and loaded with something to keep her at bay when I felt she was getting cocky. I played it cool at first, making sure that I just kept the score about even or just letting her win. My instinct was to take all the fun out of it for her, just play so that our scores were pretty much even and it became rote and boring.
This was all going fine, until one day I had a crappy day at work. We're playing for about half an hour, and she's already four drinks in and laying down enough smack talk that I could feel my blood starting to boil. I gave in to it and blasted her with a seven letter word, giving me something like eighty points. She immediately logged off and ended the game, saying she was tired. The next morning, my wife gets a call inviting us to dinner that night. It was like a compilation of everything I hate rolled up into a giant stew; enough peppers to give me indigestion for days, all washed down with a white wine that was as sweet as it was vinegary.
The strange thing is, that was the last I heard of it - she didn't want to play words with friends again. From then on she seemed to treat me with an attitude that I wouldn't say was warm, but did arrive somewhere in the neighbourhood of respect.