Lisa notes

Is Life More Like Scrabble or Bananagrams? Finding Meaning in the Games We Play

By LisaNotes July 22, 2025 Community 14 Comments

After a weekend of playing word games, I started thinking:

Is life more like Scrabble or Bananagrams?

I’ve been playing Scrabble ever since grade school. My mother was an excellent player and knew all the tricky words to get a high score.

But a while back, our daughter Jenna gave Jeff and me the Bananagrams game as a gift. Jeff and I have played game after game since then. We love it. It’s fast-paced, flexible, and chaotic in a good way.

Like Scrabble, Bananagrams also uses a pile of tiles with individual letters. Each player draws a set number of tiles to form words.

But the similarities mostly end there. Here’s how the two games differ:

Board vs. No Board
With Scrabble, you place your tiles on a shared board with designated squares. Bananagrams has no board—just an open tabletop or surface.
Turn-Based vs. Simultaneous Play
In Scrabble, players take turns. I place a word on the board. Then you place a word connecting with a previous word. In Bananagrams, everyone makes words at the same time, but totally disconnected from each other, each in our own space.
Fixed vs. Flexible Words
With Scrabble, once a word is played, it’s locked in for the remainder of the game; no changes allowed. With Bananagrams, you can rearrange or completely restart your grid at any time.
Scoring vs. Speed
Scrabble rewards strategic play with points—whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins. Bananagrams rewards speed—the first person to use all their tiles wins, regardless of the difficulty or number of words made.

Which game is more like real life?

For now, I’m leaning toward Scrabble.

While life isn’t as neat as a proper Scrabble board, or as structured as its one-turn-at-a-time rule, life does run smoother when we play interdependently like Scrabble requires. You do something; I respond. I change something; you adjust.

We’re building something together, even when we don’t realize it. We’re not racing toward a finish line, but rather running together, shaping each other.

But with Bananagrams, we’re all working in our separate space, eyes down, hoping we finish first. We don’t help each other. We’re not in it together. We’re each just going as fast as we can.

That can be fun for a game. I definitely love playing Bananagrams.

But it’s not a pattern of play I want to copy in my life.

I don’t want to “win” life by going faster. I want to love life by playing together.

On game night, I’ll play both games with gusto. But in my real life, I’ll take shared boards, community building, and the joy of writing our stories together anytime.

Which games feels more like your life right now—Scrabble or Bananagrams? Share in the comments.

revised from the archives

What the Algorithm Did to Our Words—and Why It Matters

By LisaNotes July 18, 2025 Book reviews, Technology 6 Comments

From Nadsat to “Unalive”: The Slippery Nature of Speech

This month, I’m slowly making my way through A Clockwork Orange for an upcoming book club—and it’s not been easy. Originally published in 1962, the book’s teenage narrator uses a made-up slang language called Nadsat. For me, it turns every page into a decoding exercise because I don’t speak that language.

But it also reminds me of the real-life phenomenon almost every generation lives in when younger generations create new vocabularies and sometimes new grammar to set themselves apart.

The difference now is that it’s occurring at a quicker pace because it spreads online.

Reading the brand-new book Algospeak by Adam Aleksic at the same time as the older book A Clockwork Orange highlights to me that language has been used throughout time as a barrier—between youth and adults, insiders and outsiders, and now tech and tradition.

Aleksic’s book, subtitled How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, is a lively, easy-to-read deep-dive into how algorithms are changing our language in the digital age. Aleksic is both a Harvard-trained linguist and a viral content creator known as @etymologynerd, so he is uniquely qualified to explain what’s happening—and why it matters.

What Is Algospeak?

“Algospeak” is the coded language people use online to avoid being flagged or censored by the algorithms. For example, creators use words like “unalive” instead of “dead,” or “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” to keep their work from being removed online.

But according to Aleksic, algorithms aren’t just changing language by creating these workarounds—it’s a more direct pipeline. Algorithms are shaping the very words we see and hear, and then share and speak.

The term “algospeak” was first popularized in a 2022 Washington Post article, but Aleksic uses it more broadly. He argues that algorithms don’t just police language—they influence which words go viral, which tones perform best, and how fast slang spreads across multiple platforms.

Algorithms, Identity, and Power

Aleksic’s deeper point is that algorithms are a new, invisible source of using language as power. When speech is under surveillance or suppression, people adjust how they say things. Especially among youth, these adjustments create new identities for those who learn to speak the same online slang, carving out a shared space where they feel they belong.

He also introduces readers to the euphemism treadmill. For example, he says,

“The words ‘idiot,’ ‘imbecile,’ and ‘moron’ all used to be serious words for classifying mental disability, but then they became negative, so we replaced them with the word ‘retarded,’ which also became negative, so we replaced that with ‘mentally disabled,’ which is also becoming negative.”

Nowadays, though, it’s not just society shaping the language, but platform policies and how the algorithm enforces them.

Rage-Bait, Rubbernecking, and Emotional Manipulation

A major theme of Algospeak is that the way algorithms change language is also how they manipulate emotion. Aleksic, himself an influencer, doesn’t deny the dark side of influencers using emotional hooks so they can stay visible longer in people’s feeds—what he calls “algorithmic pandering” and “rage-bait.”

As you already know if you have an Instagram or Facebook or any other social media account, the algorithm doesn’t give you what you consciously want to see—it shows you whatever it thinks will get the the biggest reaction from the most people.

Aleksic calls this “digital rubbernecking,” the online equivalent of when we slow down to look at a car crash on the side of the road.

The result? The algorithm is training us to overreact, to see ourselves as more polarized from other people than we really are. It creates a tendency in us to think that the extreme is normal, when it’s not.

The Resilience of Language—and of Us

Despite some of these depressing insights (alongside amusing insights, too), Algospeak ends with hope. Aleksic wants us to remember to use our humanness to create and connect when we’re online together. He writes,

“Language is, and will remain, one of the most important forms of power and belongingness.”

Even when our language is shaped by tech, we can still use it to express ourselves and connect with each other.

Aleksic closes his acknowledgements at the back of the book with this:

“Finally, to my readers. Keep being human and using language in new and exciting ways.”

And I believe we can keep using language in these ways—even in a world of algorithms and metadata.

Let’s keep finding fresh ways to say what we mean and mean what we say with creativity, beauty, and kindness.

If you like reading books about language, along with Aleksic, I also recommend these two books:

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Here’s an excellent NYTimes review of Algospeak here:

“The Harvard-Educated Linguist Breaking Down ‘Skibidi’ and ‘Rizz’”

Have you seen online slang or coded language in a TikTok video or social media that has surprised or confused you? Share your thoughts here in the comments.

My thanks to NetGalley for
the review copy of Algospeak

The New Word That Changed How I Think About Grief

By LisaNotes July 15, 2025 Grief, Ripple: One Word 2025 12 Comments

I waited one more minute after knocking on her door before walking away.

My patience was rewarded; she opened the door. But I could see immediately that something was wrong. Her eyes were red. She had been crying.

We talked about it.

She had recently passed the 1-year anniversary of her dad’s sudden death. Then Father’s Day hit. Next would be his birthday in July. One wave of grief after another.

And yes, she’s an adult. She had her father for many years. She has kids and grandkids now of her own.

But the ache remains. She still misses her dad.

The Myth of Closure

We often assume that when life follows its expected course—children burying parents and not the other way around—that there will be a natural sense of closure. A neatly-tied ribbon around our grief.

But if you’ve experienced a significant loss, you probably already know; even when things go as “planned,” you still may not have closure.

I’ve experienced enough losses of my own to know that some wounds never close.

And maybe they shouldn’t?

Introducing Openture

I’ve recently learned a new word (even though it’s been around for 20 years). It’s helping me make peace with a lack of closure in my own situations.

It’s openture.

Coined by psychologist Paul Pearsall, openture is the opposite of closure. It’s defined as “refraining from seeking a resolution or ending for an emotionally difficult experience.”

I read more about it in Oliver Burkeman’s wonderful book The Antidote:

“We spend too much of our lives seeking ‘closure.’ . . . What we need more of, instead, is ‘openture’ . . . embracing imperfection and easing up on the search for neat solutions.”

Openture asks us to stay present with what’s unresolved. To hold the tension. To stop racing toward a finish line that can’t be reached.

Letting the Ripples Continue

As I wrestle this year with my One Word Ripple, I’m learning that keeping the door open also keeps the ripples moving.

But if I force closure, I might also force a premature ending to something that needs to flow a bit farther.

As I walked away from the conversation with my friend, I knew I hadn’t said anything profound or insightful. I had mainly listened. To her sadness and to her love.

But by her leaving the door open for grief to pass back and forth, she was also keeping her heart open to treasured memories with her dad.

Paula Boss writes in The Myth of Closure (I’ve read half of the book so far and it’s good!):

“You’ll never be completely over the loss of someone you have loved. There is no closure, nor is there a need for it.

Instead, we remember them and learn to live with the ambiguity of absence and presence. You know they’re gone, but you keep them present in your heart and mind—even as you move forward with your life.”

Maybe that’s where we find the truest healing: not in closing things up, but having courage to keep them open.

You’ve heard of closure, but “openture”? When have you stopped seeking closure and just let things ripple on? Share in the comments.

When They Start Blinking, May You Remember

By LisaNotes July 11, 2025 Ripple: One Word 2025 19 Comments

Dusk on a Swing

It’s dusk on a summer night. I’m sitting outside on the porch swing with Jeff, my husband. We’re watching the birds at our new bird feeder (sorry squirrels, it’s not for you!), trying to identify bird songs and double-checking our answers with the Merlin Bird ID App.

And then—there they are.

The lightning bugs.

At first we see only one. Then two. Three. Then dozens. Little flickers of light floating across the front lawn.

We sit there quietly, just watching.
Our phones are put away in our pockets.
No glancing at the time.
Just two grownups sharing the kind of moment you don’t plan for, but somehow holds great meaning anyway.

A Memory Jar of Light

We break the silence to reminisce about childhood summers, staying outside to chase lightning bugs (or fireflies, if you prefer).

And memories surface from when our own daughters were young. When the lightning bugs appeared, we’d run into the house to find an empty jelly jar. Punch breathing holes in the lid. Help the girls catch as many bugs as we could (well, technically they’re beetles). Then head inside to a dark room and watch the bugs perform their light show.

It felt like holding wonder in your hands.

And then we’d release them back into the wild later that night. (Hmm, I hope we did. I think we did? I know I would now.)

The Light Still Here

It felt like magic back then.
It feels like magic again tonight.

I don’t know when we stop paying attention to lightning bugs. Maybe somewhere between:

Rushing to clean the kitchen after dinner
Dashing to mow the grass before the sun sets
Hurrying to get from here to there on time

But even when we don’t notice them, they still show up.

And maybe that’s true of more than just lightning bugs.

Notice What Matters

There are lots of tiny, quiet moments of magic around us every day, every night—if we’d only be still long enough to see them.

Things like the crackle of lightning in a summer storm. Flowers perking up after a rain. A neighbor stopping to chat in the driveway.

Moments like these don’t make the daily headlines. They’re not trending topics on social media. They won’t go viral on TikTok.

But they matter just as much—for their beauty, for their amazement, and for how they gently contribute toward human flourishing.

Let This Moment Ripple

So tonight, I’ll let the lightning bugs remind me:

To watch their flickers a little more closely
To linger outside a little while longer
To appreciate life a little more intentionally

The whirl of time will spin again soon enough. But for now, I’ll stay in this moment—just long enough to let it ripple—then gently release it as a memory for tomorrow.

When have you had a quiet moment lately that reminded you to linger a little longer? (And do you call them lightning bugs or fireflies?) Share your thoughts in the comments.

I Could Already Hear the Sirens . . . Can You?

By LisaNotes July 8, 2025 My stories, Ripple: One Word 2025 19 Comments

Is It Just Another Monday?

It’s an ordinary Monday afternoon. My daughter Jenna and I are driving home after lunch with a friend. The traffic light turns red. We stop.

As we wait, we notice a boy—maybe 10 years old—riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. Maybe he’s on his way to the store. Or a friend’s house. Or just taking a ride around the block.

Perhaps it’s just an ordinary summer day for him, too.

He approaches the intersection just as the traffic light turns green again. But he doesn’t notice the light.

He leaves the sidewalk and begins pedaling across the road.

At the same moment, a car from a side street also approaches the intersection just as the light changes. The car begins turning right.

That One Split Second

What happens next is so fast—less than one gulp of air—yet it takes all my breath away.

Sometimes it’s in the tiniest of moments that life changes forever. A single incident can ripple on, shattering not just one family, but multiple families, classrooms, communities. And strangers, too, like me.

In that split second of time, Jenna and I sit frozen in our seats. But the boy and the other car do not collide. The driver of the car—in the last possible instant—sees the boy and swerves.

That’s it. Nothing else happens.

Except the boy rides on. The car completes its turn. Jenna and I drive home.

Gratitude for What Doesn’t Happen

Instead of witnessing a tragic accident, hearing broken glass and frantic screams and emergency sirens, we return to the normal sounds of our ordinary Monday afternoon. After our hearts stop pounding. And our adrenaline runs out. And our brains adjust back to the beautiful reality of what is in this moment, instead of what could have been.

No harm done. Nothing altered. No lives changed.

What remains is gratitude. For a child I’ll never know that can laugh with his friends today, return to school in the fall, maybe grow up to be a gray-haired grandfather one day.

All because of what didn’t happen on this ordinary Monday afternoon.

The most ordinary days may be the most extraordinary ones of all.

Have you had a moment when you felt both terrified then thankful, from one breath to the next? Share your thoughts in the comments.

What the Dalai Lama Taught Me About Responsibility, Kindness, and Connection

By LisaNotes July 4, 2025 Book reviews, Compassion 6 Comments

In honor of the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday on July 5, 2025, here’s a reflection on his timeless message of compassion, responsibility, and spiritual practice from Ethics for the New Millennium—including favorite quotes and lessons from seeing him in person in Birmingham, AL.

A Personal Connection with a Global Leader

On July 6, 2025, the Dalai Lama will celebrate his 90th birthday.

Eleven years ago in 2014, I had the unforgettable experience of seeing him in person in Birmingham, Alabama. He made such a lasting impression on me—not just as a spiritual leader, but as a profoundly humble human being. He was attentive, joyful, and quite playful.

[See “5 things I Learned from the Dalai Lama” here.]

Although he is a Buddhist and I am not, his teachings and example resonate deeply with me. He doesn’t try to convert us to Buddhism; he just wants us to live more kindly and responsibly among each other—universal values that are important to all human beings.

His Message: We Are All Responsible for Each Other

“So while as Dalai Lama I have a special responsibility to Tibetans, and as a monk I have a special responsibility toward further interreligious harmony, as a human being I have a much larger responsibility toward the whole human family—which indeed we all have.”

These words were published over 24 years ago in the Dalai Lama’s book, Ethics for the New Millennium. But the issues are as relevant as ever.

In this era when division seems to dominate, the Dalai Lama’s vision of shared humanity offers a path toward healing—through compassion, humility, and personal responsibility.

The Call: What Will I Do?

The Dalai Lama doesn’t preach perfection or supernatural wisdom. In fact, he speaks plainly about his limitations:

“But I am only an ordinary human being. The best I can do is try to help them by sharing in their suffering.”

That honesty clears the way for each of us to ask:

How much responsibility am I willing to take for the suffering in the world?
What kind of commitment am I ready to make to act with compassion?
How far am I willing to be inconvenienced?

Even small steps matter. The Dalai Lama’s appeal is simple but profound:

“Do what you can, and do it with kindness.”

Practicing Kindness, One Step at a Time

Spiritual practice, according to the Dalai Lama, isn’t about ritual. It’s about how we live and how we treat each other:

“It consists in nothing more than acting out of concern for others.”

Here are some practical ways to live this out:

Think less about your own worries and more about someone else’s well-being
Be patient even when anxious
Serve others with humility, regardless of your job or status
Resist judging people by appearance or situation
Practice daily kindness—sincerely and consistently

Easier said than done, I know. But even setting an intention to live more aligned with our values is a step in the right direction.

Quotes to Keep Close

Here are a few more quotes from Ethics for the New Millennium that I am returning to on the eve of the Dalai Lama’s birthday:

“Cowardice arises when we lose all confidence as a result of fear. Patient forbearance means that we remain firm even if we are afraid.”

“It is far more useful to be aware of a single shortcoming in ourselves than it is to be aware of a thousand in somebody else.”

“All human endeavor is potentially great and noble… so long as we carry out our work with good motivation.”

“Try not even to think of yourself as better than the humblest beggar. You will look the same in your grave.”

Final Thoughts

The Dalai Lama’s teachings aren’t just for monks or mystics. They’re for all of us who want to live meaningful lives in the midst of everyday messiness. His 90th birthday is a reminder that while he may be aging, his message of compassionate responsibility continues to be timeless.

“Treat everyone as if they were a close friend… I speak as a human being: one who, like yourself, wishes to be happy and not to suffer.”

So to the Dalai Lama I say, “Happy 90th Birthday, my friend! Thank you for your gifts of wisdom to the world.”

What do you know about the Dalai Lama? Share your thoughts in the comments.