I like words.

That may sound like a strange statement but it’s true. I like words. I like reading them. I like writing them. I like speaking them. I love how words often sound like their meaning. How certain ones flow off the tongue effortlessly and others are succinct little chirps. I love the differing number of syllables and how some are spelled phonetically and others have no rhyme or reason to their spelling whatsoever. I love silent letters and multiple meanings. But mostly I just love words.

I like them all, but I do have my favorites, the ones I use over and over again, the ones I probably use too often. There’s really no explaining why I love these particular words. They’re not the most difficult or the most eloquent sounding. They’re just my favorites. And if you know me in real life, or even if you frequently read my stuff here on CollegeCandy, you’ll know that these words are, in fact, a very big part of my everyday vernacular.

Ooh vernacular, now that’s a good word…

10. Legit. A shorthanded slang for legitimately. Often used by me for statements that are far from legitimate. But using the shortened version, “legit,” instead of “legitimately” makes the hyperbole okay somehow. At least for me.

9. Quip. A witty comeback. A short statement. I think I love using the word quip so much because I like to quip. A lot. So if I refer to other people’s comments as quips than maybe they’ll refer to my comments in the same way. Plus I like the alliteration of “quick quip.”

8. Simultaneously. A very, very pretty word that, let’s face it, sounds a hell of a lot more eloquent than “at the same time.”

7.  Quintessential. Not really a word you hear in everyday language, but I use it all the time. And probably more often than is appropriate. But I can’t help myself. It’s one of those words that just flows off the tongue. The “s” sound makes it sound so pretty.

6. Touché. This is a favorite of mine mostly because it allows you to still sound like you have the upper-hand even when admitting that your opponent actually has a point. Like, sure, you may have won the argument, but do you know how to bow out gracefully with words that require an accent? I do.

5. Repartee. More often than not when I used this word it’s preceded by the word witty. Because really, what’s the point of having a repartee if it’s not a witty repartee?

4. Pretentious. I’ve described more people than I care to admit using this word. It’s great because it allows you to sound important and intelligent and sure of yourself while making it sound like a bad thing when someone else behaves in the exact same way.

3. Adorable. Perfect for describing a puppy or a pair or shoes. Very few words are as adaptable as the word adorable. So make the most of it, why don’t you.

2. Absurd. A word my brother knows well. Mostly because it’s how I describe every one of his statements/actions/decisions since I was old enough to learn the word.

1. Fabulous.  Blame it on Carrie Bradshaw or Coco Chanel. Or whoever you please, but fabulous will pretty much always be my favorite word in the English dictionary. And you know why? Because it’s fabulous.

I know I’m not the only lover of language out there. What are your favorite words? 

Remember when you were a little kid, and you’d actually wake up on time for school… just so you could huddle next to the radio and listen for your school to be called on the list of snow days? With winter’s doom impending and temperatures dropping faster than The Situation’s pants, we can’t help but cross our fingers and pray.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Are snow days something you never grow out of? Or, in college, do they prove that miracles really can happen? Here’s how our anticipation of snow days has evolved since grammar school.

Then: A snow day meant a day off from times tables.
Now: We don’t have to finish copying someone else’s MiniTabs before Stats lab.

Then: We would make a beeline to the street and get all the neighborhood kids together for a snowball fight.
Now: We don’t have to brave arctic winds to walk to class and sit through lecture with snotsicles hanging from our frostbitten faces.

Then: Since we were already up at the crack of dawn, we could take advantage of the snow day and start building a snow man as soon as we got “the word.”
Now: We can go back to sleep for about six hours, and wake up just in time for happy hour.

Then: Snow days meant putting on snow pants and trekking to the biggest hill in town for a full day of sledding.
Now: Snow days mean putting on our beer coat and trekking to the bar for a full day of boozing.

(Note: I love how college students use a blizzard as an excuse to go to the bar, yet even when school isn’t canceled, we deem it too treacherous to walk to class.)

Then: For some unfortunate children, snow days meant driveway-shoveling duty before the parents got home.
Now: After the storm passes, we have to shovel our cars out from behind the snow banks the university plows have inevitably created throughout the parking lot.

Then: We could spend a whole extra day working on our vocabulary exercises!
Now: We could start that research paper that was due three days ago… but who are we kidding? Those episodes of Law and Order SVU aren’t going to watch themselves!

Then: We had an excuse to drink hot chocolate for breakfast.
Now: We have an excuse to drink a thirty-pack for breakfast.

I think it’s clear that snow days are one of mankind’s greatest inventions. Honestly, snow delays and cancellations are one of the top reasons to attend a university in a colder climate. I feel bad for those of you who are earning degrees in Hawaii, Florida, California, or any other season-less state. You will never experience the joys of the world’s most beautiful Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card: the beloved snow day!

Want mas? Don’t worry, there are plenty more faves where this came from.]

We might be too old to go door-to-door and ask strangers for candy… but we’re not too old to dress up as slutty versions of our favorite childhood fairy tales characters, animals, or public service workers, are we? Besides, if we’re struggling to pay $49.99 for a “Sexy Bull Fighter” costume, dammit, we want to get the most bang for our buck!

Here are a few games and party options that you can host throughout Halloween week, just to get into the spirit of things!

Liquor Treat
This game can be the most fun, but is also the most difficult to pull off, especially if you live in a dorm with a strict RA or a No-Alcohol Policy. Similar to an “Around-the-World” party, you have to rally everyone on your floor/in your apartment building to participate. The members of each room or apartment choose a theme…and a type of liquor. When guests arrive, they go door to door and can stay to mingle in any room they like. When they ring the doorbell, they are also rewarded with a shot– hence, this is the grown-up’s version of Trick or Treat.

Scary Movie Drinking Games
Take advantage of the fact that F/X, Sci-Fi, and all of the basic cable channels will be playing Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween over and over for the whole month of October. If you are familiar with the movie, you can make up your own rules – e.g. take a shot every time the theme song plays in Halloween, or chug a beer every time you hear the “whispers” in Friday the 13th, or you can find several ready-made drinking games online to play. The good news? You’ll be so buzzed by the end that you won’t be too scared to sleep with the lights off!

Monster Mash
(Courtesy of Celebrations.com)
This is one of those counting drinking games that is so difficult to get the hang of, and so easy to get absolutely smashed by playing.

Sitting in a circle, you and your friends go around the room and count off–no small feat for college students! On numbers divisible by “3,” the player says the word “monster” instead of the number, and on numbers divisible by “5,” they say “mash” instead of the number. Whoever screws up, drinks. Once you get going, then, the game should sound something like, “1..2…monster…4….mash…monster….7…8….monster….mash.”

Boo! Zoo
Too smart to waste your night on a mere counting game? Throw in some crazy hand gestures! This is the Halloweenified version of the game “Zoo,” which you may or may not have heard of, but that needs to get into your Drinking Game vocabulary.

To play Zoo, everyone sits in a circle, again, and before you begin, go around the room and have everyone think of a word and a quick hand gesture to go along with it. For Halloween, then, a player might be “Ghost” and have a ghostlike motion, while another player is “Stab” and makes the universal signal for stabbing someone.

To begin the game, everyone must clap in a “We Will Rock You” rhythm. The starting player is predetermined, and the opening chant is as follows: “What are we playing?” “Boo Zoo!” “Why are we playing?” “Get f**ked up!”

The starting player continues the clapping, but inserts her word and gesture into it, and then inserts another players’ word and signal. Example: clap-clap-Ghost, clap-clap-Stab. Stab must be alert, and continue the clapping rhythm, following suit by shouting another players’ signal and performing their movement. The best part of this game is that whenever someone messes up, all players must partake in a group social! This one gets extremely tricky in large groups, which means more drinking for all involved!

Bobbing for Booze
I’m not going to lie, bobbing for apples was NOT my favorite fall game growing up; then again, who really wants to stick their face in some tepid water that the other kids have probably snotted and drooled in, only to come out with a freaking apple? For college purposes, why not mix things up a bit? Buy a bunch of nips from the liquor store (or have everyone bring a couple to throw into the pot), and toss them in a bin or vat of some sort that’s filled with water. Give everyone a turn to bob for nips, and then let everyone shoot their prizes! If you want to be bad, buy some nips of the nastiest liquor you can find, because you won’t be able to see what you’re bobbing for while you play.

And if you are really up for a challenge, toss the nips in a vat of jungle juice instead of water, and see where the night takes you from there!

[Get your Halloween on here.]

Some of us are the Charlottes who are happy knowing at the end of the day there is a guy that will be thinking about us before we fall asleep. Some of us are the Samanthas who are happy knowing we have a guy we can shag before we fall asleep. Ahh, and then there are those in between-ers like myself. We want someone to love and shag us before we tuck in for the night.

Whichever category you fall into, it’s no wonder we’re all looking for that special person to “complete” us.

Having a boyfriend brings about a sense of pride and accomplishment. It gives us all feelings of worth, self esteem and validation. Oh, and a serious case of the butterflies.

As sad as that may be, it’s the truth. Sure, the powerful and independent woman can find all of that on her own, but the fact is we’ve been taught our whole lives to want a boyfriend. Case in point: romantic movies. Those friggin’ things don’t do jack sh!t for a single girl besides motivate those starry-eyed expectations of how the majority of real guys act. Homegirl, I’m not talkin’ only about movies along the lines of “The Notebook” either. Those Disney Princess movies of carpet rides and glass slippers laced our childhood hopes of boyfriends with metaphorical crack before we got our training wheels off.

So yes, I want a boyfriend! You want a boyfriend! Your dog wants a boyfriend!

And there is nothing wrong with that. It is normal to want to have someone to talk to at the end of the day and to remind you how amazing you are. Someone who is going to give you bear hugs, forehead kisses, and be an olympic gold-medalist cuddler. It’s a part of the human moral fiber.

So for those cynical singles who won’t admit at the end of the day that they truly do want “that special person,” stick that in your juice box and suck it! Claiming you don’t want one may make you feel better about the fact that you don’t have one, but I truly feel that everyone deep down wants a boyfriend.

Thoughts?

Remember when you were a little kid, and you’d actually wake up on time for school… just so you could huddle next to the radio and listen for your school to be called on the list of snow days?

With winter’s doom impending and temperatures dropping faster than an eight ball at Amy Winehouse’s flat, we can’t help but cross our fingers and pray… Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Are snow days something you never grow out of? Or, in college, do they prove that miracles really can happen? Here’s how our anticipation of snow days has evolved since grammar school.

Then: A snow day meant a day off from times tables.

Now: We don’t have to finish copying someone else’s MiniTabs before Stats lab.

Then: We would make a beeline to the street and get all the neighborhood kids together for a snowball fight.

Now: We don’t have to brave arctic winds to walk to class and sit through lecture with snot-cicles hanging from our frostbitten faces.

Then: Since we were already up at the crack of dawn, we could take advantage of the snow day and start building a snow man as soon as we got “the word.”

Now: We can go back to sleep for about six hours, and wake up just in time for happy hour.

Then: Snow days meant putting on snow pants and trekking to the biggest hill in town for a full day of sledding.

Now: Snow days mean trekking to the bar and putting our liquor jackets on.

(Note: I love how college students use a blizzard as an excuse to go to the bar, yet even when school isn’t cancelled, we deem it too treacherous to walk to class.)

Then: For some unfortunate children, snow days meant driveway-shoveling duty before the parents got home.

Now: After the storm passes, we have to shovel our cars out from behind the snow banks the university plows have inevitably created throughout the parking lot.

Then: We could spend a whole extra day working on our vocabulary exercises!

Now: We could start that research paper that was due three days ago… but who are we kidding? We probably won’t.

Then: We had an excuse to drink hot chocolate for breakfast.

Now: We have an excuse to drink a thirty-pack for breakfast.

I think it’s clear that snow days are one of mankind’s greatest inventions. Honestly, snow delays and cancellations are one of the top reasons to attend a university in a colder climate. I feel bad for those of you who are earning degrees in Hawaii, Florida, California, or any other season-less state. You will never experience the joys of the world’s most beautiful Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card: the beloved snow day!

I admit, I was what a communications professor would have categorized as a “laggard” of technology users (See? You use these random bits from class sometimes!), and I absolutely, passionately, vehemently loathed the applications on Facebook. A good friend of mine went so far as to title the profiles with superwalls, superpokes, the ability to throw sheep at people and start zombie fights as “MySpaced out profiles,” and we would roll our eyes together at how lame our generation had become. Was it not enough that we had integrated Facebook into our daily lives, making it a verb and using it to evaluate our acquaintances and friends alike? Lame, indeed, twenty-somethings. And so I was a staunch hater of all things that were not on the original Facebook.

That is, until I discovered Scrabulous.

Perhaps because I am not at all athletically inclined, I get incredibly competitive for word and board games. You get to literally play a game of Scrabble with a friend of your choice, and you can start as many as you want at once. The application keeps track of points and tiles for you, even tells you if a word exists or not, and maintains a record of your stats as a player. Basically, it’s as close as you can get to playing in person, only the games stretch out over how often you and your opponent are on Facebook.

Granted, there are some drawbacks to Scrabulous, such as not being a fast enough alt-tabber to hide the Scrabble board from your computer screen when your boss walks in, and sometimes you can be left high and dry by an opponent who doesn’t log on for a few days. No big deal, it just gives you time to strategize, and at least you can explain to your boss (should they comment anyway) that you’re just trying to expand your vocabulary before that big meeting.

Some tips and tricks for the Scrabulous addict:

1. I’ve been screwed many a time by opponents who save their big-point letters for the end. Try doing this yourself.
2. The two- and three-letter words are key. It’s all about using multiple letters from one word to build your next one, make the most of those points.
3. If your game seems a little dull, try adding some commentary in the Message section. Sometimes talking smack can add to the enjoyment of your class/workday.

The English part of that standardized bullshit was easier for me than the mind numbing numbers sections, but a little thing called vocabulary kept me from getting a top score. Learning words that people don’t use on a daily basis wasn’t ever something I cared to do, but had I only known a few more nerdy terms, I could have hit the language jackpot.

Classless Education, a “collective of comedy writers and educators” have decided I’m not the only one who could use some vocab help. The group recently put out a book called The Yo Momma Vocabulary Builder, an “irreverent, educational” paperback that attempts to teach the finer points of language with some of the oldest jokes in the book.

“Your Momma’s so emaciated,” one sample joke goes, “she can hula hoop in a fruit loop!” The entry also includes the word origin, how to say it, and an explanation for today’s times. “Emaciated isn’t just skinny, it’s too skinny, unhealthy looking, skeletal. Think Olsen twins, supermodels, Gollum from Lord of the Rings, and Ally McBeal.”

Besides the fact that no one remembers—or cares about—Ally McBeal anymore, The Yo Mamma Vocabulary Builder sounds like an amusing way to learn bigger, better words. Will the majority of the jokes in there most likely be lame? Sure, but leafing through a Thesaurus is lamer.

…And listening to a tutor with giant coke glasses explain the meaning of pallid on a Friday night is even worse. My junior year in high school can attest to that.