Norm and Dutchy (Yolande) Yarrow are at Waverly University; he in the chaplain’s department, she is an assistant director of recreation. They are giving a party. There has already been one party game, with people tied back to back having to get free. That was Dutchy’s idea. Now another game, suggested by the secretary to the registrar.
Good grief. It reminds me of a game of charades from my grad student days. Book title, two words, first word, first syllable, the gesture of pouring. I got it right away: Philosophical Hermeneutics, by Hans-Georg Gadamer. We’d all read it in a seminar. Good grief.
Leaven of Malice is the second novel of Davies’s Salterton Trilogy.
Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, March 16, 2022
The Braingame
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comments: 2
(Sorry for the delayed response - busy weekend over here)
We used to play this version of charades as a family game when I was a child - without all the nonsense of adding/dropping letters and such like. It was basically what the extract considers to be the primary game, where one group acts out the word and the other group tries to guess. It didn't have to be book titles (usually it wasn't, as proper nouns were considered unsuitable choices). You could act syllable-by-syllable, or groups of syllables, or the whole word - but you had to inform the other group how many syllables in total and what the breakdown was of the actions (eg - whole word 5 syllables, first and second actions 2 syllables, third action one syllable).
It also involved some minor dressing up with whatever convenient things were to hand. An uncle always tried to appear as a vicar or minister of some kind, and burial or wedding scenes were common stock in trade, with the acted-out-meaning varying hugely.
I didn't come across the whole "book title, film, etc" until my teens were almost over, and still reckon the version we used to play is superior.
I know it as a party game too, with books, movies, TV (I think), and quotations (I think). Pantomime alone, with word and syllable counts, and tugging on the ear for “sounds like.” For a book, open an imaginary book; for a movie, cranking an old-time camera; for a quotation, air quotes. I don’t know what might have signaled TV.
I suspect that the Braingame must come from real life in the company of academics.
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