In tonight’s State of the Union address, there are some words and phrases that are bound to appear — “prevail,” “work together,” and “that our military leaders have requested” — and we could play Bingo with them, or take a shot of tequila every time they show up.

Instead, let’s play Negative Bingo in which you are given a card with phrases on it (or perhaps you should be allowed to purchase words the way you can buy search terms at Google) and you lose points for every one that does show up. (Caution: Don’t take a shot every time one of your words is not used.)

For example, here are some terms unlikely to show up in the mouth of the Great Decider tonight:

“Victory parade” “As I was reading in the Koran recently…”

“Abu Ghraib” “Raise taxes” and “to pay for” in the same sentence

“The right of women to…” “Osama Bin Laden”

“Maimed” “Thanks to Al Gore…”

Any admission of error expressed in the active voice

The terms have to have some likelihood of showing up, so you don’t get credit for Bush not using the phrases “prolapsed anus” or “I’m sorry.” In fact, different terms should be worth different amounts. A negative words market perhaps?

Anyway, what words would you put on your negative bingo card?

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No need to believe me on this—much less to care—but I think I was one of the inventors of the sort of phrase-bingo people play at speeches like this. In the early 1990s, when I was at Interleaf, I created phrase bingo cards for a company meeting. I even wrote a Lisp script to generate them, which for me was like programming the lunar lander. I thought it was a new idea then, although I’m sure its eventual success was due to someone else inventing it earlier or afterwards. Anyone know the history of this epiphenomenon? [Tags: does politics bush humor bingo]

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