so let me just tell you

...about the new verb I learned. Jew. That's right, Jew. As in a member of a perfectly legitimate ethnicity which includes a number of various schools of thought. You are probably familiar with this word, you say. Well, I am too. As a noun. As a plural noun. As an adjective, even. But a verb? Enter scrabble, the game of making words from small pieces of wood.

My brother and I were engaged in what should have been a Scrabble death-match against Woman Who Lives in Our House Temporarily - this is her Indian name ( Indian as in the politically incorrect term for the people(s) who populated the United States before being driven along a crying trail to end up in minimal numbers in small parcels of land mostly devoted to casinos hundreds of years later, not as in the actual term Indian used to describe the people(s) of India. If I ever refer to them, they will be called "real Indians").

Woman Who Lives in Our House Temporarily suggests this game, this battle of the wits, this death-match of intellect-based warfare, and of course I readily agreed. I am always ready to prove my dominance in combat. So the three of us assume the ready positions: my brother cringing in anticipation of the word beating he is about to endure and myself understandably gleeful in anticipation of the same thing - but Woman Who Lives in Our House Temporarily is inexplicably casual and friendly of demeanor. What? A ruse, you ask? FALSE.

I discovered that not everyone plays Scrabble as though they are battling a serial killer with a genius-level IQ in a word-game for their life. Let me just tell you, if the score doesn't matter, why the cock are you playing this game? If you let everyone see your letters and make up words and break all the rules, should you not just play Candyland and stop pretending the pieces and their placement on the board have meaning? I say you should. At least you're not living a lie if you KNOW you're playing Candyland.

In the middle of this useless game of Candyland-in-disguise a word was laid on the board. I won't say who did it, I won't say why, but the word was "Jewed". And so naturally I issued my best derisive laugh and listed the accepted tenses for the word Jew, none of which include a past-tense verb. Or any kind of verb, actually. Enter the apparently obliviously offensive colloquialism presented by Woman Who Lives in Our House Temporarily.

Jewed: something her father says to describe being haggled down from a starting price; a word descriptive of stealing, managing, or haggling with regard to money. Example: "I really wanted this bicycle, but I really had to Jew the guy down to afford it."