I had a memory flash in September 2024 from an event at Alleyn’s School that must have been about 50 years ago now.
Janie and I went to see Here In America at The Orange Tree, Richmond:
Great play/production btw. The play is about the Second Red Scare in the 1950s.
It brought back to my mind a memory of playing Call My Bluff in an English class. That simple panel game had teams of three trying to convince the other team of three that “bluff” definitions of unusual words were actually true…and that true definitions were in fact bluffs.
Call My Bluff was “appointment to view” stuff in the 1970s – certainly in our household. Mind you, there wasn’t exactly a lot of choice back then.
The class version of the game was to split into teams of three and try to convince the rest of the class to vote for bluffs rather than the true definitions.
My team was given the word MCCARTHYISM. I must have recently learnt a passage of Hebrew in Hebrew classes with the word “machar” (מָחָר) in it. I quoted the short passage and explained that the word “machar” means tomorrow. I then strung out this small truth into a flight of fancy that there is a sect of Judaism, known as MCCARTHYISM, that venerates the future.
I know what you are thinking. The word would surely be spelt MACHARTHEISM if it had that definition. But such subtleties were probably beyond almost all of us at that age. I must have made the idea seem convincing.
When the class voted on the three definitions proposed for the word MCCARTHYISM, the true definition came second and my bluff got the most votes.
For some reason, this moment of smartarsed glory must have resided at the back of my memory all these decades, only to be revived by seeing Here In America.
But I also recall that, even at the time, I learnt quite a lot from this tiny episode. I learnt that using a grain of truth to disguise a lie (or bluff) is a very effective method of concealment. I learnt that nobody likes a smartarse, because the episode, while momentarily pleasing the teacher, did not make me popular with my class. And I subsequently learnt that my possession of a moral compass and my lack of a poker face would make me a very bad candidate for a future in bluffing.
But did we play that game in 1S, with Ian Sandbrook, or in 2AK with Mike Lempriere? I don’t recall.
Still, McCarthyism is all about naming names and I have named names for both of those classes:
So if you are, or have ever been, a member of one of those classes…
…and if you recall playing Call My Bluff in class…
…please let me know everything that you know. Yes, I mean everything.
Just answer the question.
And, of course, name yet more names…
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