...our chief intellectual exercise was the Letter Game: word-making and word-taking. At this we became practically professional....Any dictionary word was allowed, but no proper names, and a word could be stolen only by adding a letter and changing the meaning... This had been a Down game originally...[Down was Charles Darwin's house].
Then there was the story of my grandfather (C.D.) [Charles Darwin] who, on seeing the word MOTHER on the board, looked at it for a long time, and then said, "Moe-ther; there's no word MOETHER." I feel that the Psychologists might get a great deal of fun out of this anecdote--I beg their pardons, I don't mean fun, but Important Information; clues to the conception of the Origin of Species on the one hand, or to his ill health on the other; both of which developments could doubtless be proved by this story to be the direct consequences of the early death of his own MOETHER.
--Gwendolen Darwin Raverat (1885-1957), Charles Darwin's granddaughter, in her memoir Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952), chapter XII, Sport. The whole Darwin family sounds wonderful
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