Naughty Fruits

Last night I played Boggle with the Joes. Little Joe loves games. He wants every night to be game night, and we are happy to oblige if it means we can keep him from spending hours in front of the television or computer. His favorites are Life, Monopoly and, more recently, Risk. On a regular basis, however, he’s just as likely to choose Scrabble, which he loves, or Boggle because it’s easier to squeeze these games into the hour space we have between dinner and his bedtime.

I hardly ever challenge in either Scrabble or Boggle, but last night, Joe (my partner, not Little Joe) made “sot,” which I thought was incorrect, so I took out the dictionary to challenge him. He claimed it refers to a fool and he ended up being right, but in the midst of looking up the word in question, I came across something that I would never have believed had I not seen it with my own two eyes.


I must admit that I thought I knew all there was to know about squirting cucumbers. I was wrong. The definition of a “ripened fruit [that] forcibly ejects the seeds and juice” is priceless, and I cannot help but think there’s a little camp involved here. One (or more) of those crusty old editors loved the idea of a squirting cucumber so much that they just had to include an illustration! Surely, they must have been aware of the naughty nature of it all. Joe and I had a good laugh over it.

Little Joe just rolled his eyes.