Beyond Word Association

I was just chatting and a fun thing came to me...

That old game to pass the time, the word association game, can be interesting for a bit, but it has short legs.  However, I do like to play it with children because it encourages the practice of intuitive associative thinking that is very much the stuff of metaphoric thinking, and thus poetry.

But when I was chatting, it came to me to lay a challenge not just of a free association between words, but rather, three things that describe a concept.

For example, I was asked, "Quick!  Say three Pale things...", and the spontaneous answer was, "A ghost of a chance... the lightness of joy... the convictions of a coward...".  Now we may argue just how apropos each is, or how and why they might or might not connect well, but it takes the old game a little farther.  Done in a back and forth, with no time taken to break the rhythm and explain, it can become a back and forth that sounds like a weird sort of riddle game between Hobbit and Gollum (or dragon).

I like this.