As mentioned a few days ago, I have added an intriguing cyber game to Sanity’s Bluff, and some of you will like it. You will find it amongst all the clutter of my sidebar, to the right…Please don't stumble and fall off of the Bluff, making your way through all of the clutter. It is there waiting for you. It is called Hangman.

Hangman is a very addictive game if you are someone who loves the english language.

Now, if I get bored of the crusing the web, I spend some time at my own blog, thinking about words.

I am very good at this game.

Because I am such a neat guy, I will share some little tips about the game of hangman,that I was taught way back in the late 50’s by a public school teacher. This wonderful teacher was not a member of the NEA, but she knew how to teach rowdy red-headed boys to read. I will always be thankful that I sat in this teachers classroom. You would have had to have been there to understand. It was what I call; Teaching with Discipline. And it happened in the 1950’s. If todays educational monopoly really cared about teaching children, they would investigate what worked so well when the budgets were small and classes were big, yes the Leave it to Beaver Years in America.

Something I find paradoxal, is how the baby boomers (myself included) usually got everything we wanted from our parents, but at school we got what the board of education wanted us to get. And if we balked at this plan, we learned something about another board used in education.

But back to what the teacher taught me about hangman.

Here is how to start a game of hangman. Do you know the vowels of the English language? For all of you that graduated from American High School in the last 20 years, here are the vowels of the English language.

A…E…I….O….U….and sometimes Y.

You want to figure out the mystery word before hanging yourself?

Start the game of hangman by selecting vowels in the exact order they appear in the English language. A E I O U and sometimes Y

If it is a 7 letter word and you hit 3 A’s on the first guess………..you may not need to select vowels any more, but most of the time it will serve you well to select all 5 of the vowels, and then look carefully….could there be anyway that a ‘sometimes Y’ would be a vowel in the word?

After finishing off the vowels, you are ready for the consonants. Again, for those that have graduated from American High Schools in the last 20 years; consonants are the 20 or 19 remaining letters of the alphabet, the ones that are not vowels.

Do I need to explain the concept of alphabet?

So the next thing you should do is to try the consonants that show up the most often in words of the English language.

Here are the three consonants that appear the most frequently in the English language.

R, S and T

If you cannot correctly guess the word in question with this start, you may want to try Tinker Toys for mental stimulation.