"Gaming extends vocabulary." Topic

One incident from your past, when and where? For me, Troglodyte, from D & D Monster Manual circa. 1981.

For me, it would have to be foreign terms, like cuirassier, hussar, PanzerKampfwagen, Cataphract, etc.

d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20. For me, before 1977 dice were just 'dice' and had six sides.

Gelatinous cube!!

Hypaspist, Psiloi, any Napoleonic unit type, 'spontaneous mid-air disassembly', Soviet citynames-Krivoi Rog is my favorite, Armor Piercing Fin Stabilised Discarding Sabot Depleted Uranium Long Rod Penetrater, Aether, Legio Astarte, ad infinitum.

Every time Skippy or I start a new campaign I do a bunch of research and learn all kinds of .

first time… all the weapons/armor from original D&D..

Running an RPG last summer, I learned a lot about millstones. I really didn't understand how they worked, and I learned some very interesting words.

Anything from the Late Eastern Roman army…

pileus: a felt hat without a brim.

I learned "polyhedral" long before it came up in math class. For that matter, spending a few years getting used to XdY dice notations made the basics of algebra a breeze when school finally got to it, and by the time probability and statistics was even an elective option I knew the principles better than the teacher did.

Gaming helps vocabulary and math skills – and it makes you sexier too. :)

Gaming helps vocabulary and math skills – and it makes you sexier too. :)

Yes, women will swoon if you tell them all about your gaming triumphs in explicit detail. Of course by "swoon" I mean "fall asleep from utter boredom." Of course, for some the effect is quite the opposite— they will become extremely excited and shriek at the prospect of spending an evening with you. And they'll run out the door, still shrieking. And then, in their excitement, they'll change their phone numbers, abandon their e-mail accounts, and possibly even move to another state (or province), it overcomes them so much. *Sigh* Life's tough for a geek god.

Back OT:
I certainly learned about weapons, armor and certain folklore elements of other cultures from D&D, as well as extremely useful words like "catoblepas" and "wyvern." I simply cannot count the times in my life in which I've been called upon to produce just these words. Or "ransuer" or "Lochabar axe" or "Lucerne hammer." Yes, these phrases are simply unimaginably useful. (As in "I can't possibly imagine how they could be useful for any ordinary purpose.")

I did learn "psiloi", "bricole", "limber", "prolong" and "shako" from connections with gaming. These are as useful in real life as the terms from D&D— simply amazing, isn't it?

Gaming has done remarkable things for my knowledge of Russian geography (at least with twentieth century city names!).

In the good old days, Airfix kits had text instructions, as well as the diagrams showing how to assemble them. This meant that as an eight-year-old I was entirely familiar with words such as "omit", "nacelle", and "anhedral" that were not exected to be included in the average eight-year-old's vocabulary.

In later years, I acquired a weirdly extensive German military-technical vocabulary that caused some degree of despair to my instructor in lunchtime conversational German lessons.

And I did feel mightily smug when I read a book review of someone-or-other's history of England where it was suggested that words like "schiltron", "barding", "plashing" and "calthrop" were in some way exotic and unusual (although I would usually spell it "caltrop").

I also taught myself a bit of elementary trigonomety the year before we did it at school, because I needed it for my artillery rules.

All the best,

John.

I've learnt plenty of new swear words/curses since my return to gaming just under 2 years ago. Does that count?

The only (non-swear) word I can think of that I've encountered that I didn't already know was "keil" for pike columns.