Rachel, in ‘Medical Malapropisms’ (Wordplay) gave me this idea for a game, if anyone would like to try.

PASS THE PARCEL (web-enabled)

1 The Starter chooses a word in (reasonably common) use in Standard English (all variants!), and privately mails it to the First Recipient.
2 The Recipient must try to surreptitiously introduce this word as many times as possible into their ordinary posts within (and only within) the Miscellaneous and Wordplay & Fun threads.
3 Others must guess the word, mailing the Starter privately with their guesses as posts build the evidence.
4 The Starter can announce a hit by the Guesser, and the score achieved by the First Recipient prior to being sussed.
5 Each Recipient will end up with their own score plus 50% of the score of their successor, to encourage the conspiracy factor!
6 The First Recipient becomes the new Starter the next day (allowing for the spread of time zones) and the successful Guesser becomes the Second Recipient…
7 The new Starter can then choose a new word, to privately mail to the Second Recipient, who tries in their turn to introduce it into their conversation…

It might be fun, an innocent background noise within the other threads of meaning – and the balance to be struck by choosing too plain a word (easy to introduce) and too strange a word (easy to spot) should be a challenge.

Question – would it be better if each new Recipient remained completely anonymous, so that the field would not know whom to even suspect? Or maybe just announce the world regional zone: “The new Mr or Ms X comes from the Antipodes…”?

Sign up here if you feel like this is worth a try – if we get a big enough nucleus starting, all others could join in or ignore as they chose.