Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

Ghost is a spelling game that's good with kids in automobiles.  The
"It" names a letter and the other players follow in turn adding
letters until someone spells a word.  Three-letter and shorter words
don't count.  The person who completes a word becomes a "G" and
starts the next word.  Every time a player completes a word he adds
a letter until someone has spelled out "G-H-O-S-T" and that person
is now a ghost.  Living players cannot hear or see ghosts.  If a
player acknowledges the existence of a ghost he adds a letter.  This
keeps the ghosts in the game; with children there must be rules
about what kind of behavior by the ghost is permitted (no hitting,
no pinching, etc.).  If someone adds a letter that apparently does
not lead to a correctly spelled word, the next player can challenge
and then one or the other of them adds a letter.  The last player
alive wins.

Super Ghost is for adults.  The same rules, except that players can
add letters to the front of the word.  This permits clever things to
be done with plurals, suffixes, and prefixes.  It can be very
challenging.  For example, if I hadn't told you about "nuu" and it
was your turn to add or prefix a letter, what would you have done?  
Or try this: "ngh".  Your turn.

Thurber wrote an essay on Super Ghost (he calls it "Superghosts"):
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1951/09/29/1951_09_29_027_TNY_CARDS
_000231926 or http://preview.tinyurl.com/m54e6z

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(game)

"Aloominum" is standard US pronunciation. "Newkewlar" is substandard in
my book, but is widespread enough to be called a variant.  "Howdy"
(stress on first syllable) was my dad's nickname, in addition to being a
common usage in many (usually rural or southern) areas.  As you spell
"howdee", I want to stress both syllables and let out a yell, a la
Minnie Pearl, who will be long remembered. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnie_Pearl  )

Americans pronounce the word 'aluminum' like aloominum and they pronounce
'aluminium' (if they ever say it which is rare) as 'aloominium'.
Americans are NOT pronouncing 'aluminium' as aloominum, they are pronouncing
a different word - aluminum.
For the record, though I'm pretty sure we've done this one to death before,
Humphrey Davy discovered the element which has the symbol Al and the atomic
number 13 by identifying the metal base of alum. He called it alumium (no
'n', one 'i') in 1808 [1] but changed his mind and called it aluminum (one
'n', one 'i') in 1812.[2]
However, in that same year a contributor to the Quarterly Review decided
aluminium (one 'n', two 'i's') sounded better.[3]
Americans stuck with the new-fangled word for a while but eventually went
back to 'aluminum' which they use pretty much universally today.
They are NOT mispronouncing 'aluminium', they are sticking with Sir
Humphrey's preferred word. The rest of the world still goes along with the
jackanapes who thought the metal should be aluminium, to keep it in sync
with such as potassium and sodium (but not with such as platinum). We don't
know who this was but we know he had nothing to do with identifying the
element and if he had been reborn any time from 1940 onwards he would be a
prodigious poster here.

OED cites for earliest usages:
[1]  1808 Sir H. Davy in Phil. Trans. XCVIII. 353 Had I been so fortunate
as+to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should
have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and
glucium.

[2] 1812 Sir H. Davy Chem. Philos. I. 355 As yet Aluminum has not been
obtained in a perfectly free state.

[3] 1812 Q. Rev. VIII. 72 Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of
writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical
sound.