The Kinds of Things I Think About . . .

Hey, this is Randy.

I was thinking about words with double letters today. I was wondering how many letters of the alphabet I can think up a word with a double letter for. You know, "rabbit" for b, "raccoon" for either c or o. I came up with 24 of the letters (I won't spoil it for you) if you count Arabic words for jj and yy. One stipulation was that I didn't count names like "Hawaii" or abbreviations like www.

I thought for a really long time about the two I couldn't do. (All right, actually I didn't think about qq that much-- I figured it's hopeless.) I did think about xx for a long time, though. This is what I came up with: Ex-xenophobe. It's not in the dictionary-- not even the 6-inch thick one I have by my bedside, but xenophobe means "someone afraid of, or who shows hatred toward a foreign culture." What if you were no longer someone who was afraid of or hated foreigners? Would you be an ex-xenophobe. Does the dash disqualify it as an xx word.

What do you think?