Editing My Word! (section)

== Content==
The two teams faced questions devised, for the first 21 series, by Mason, of whom Muir wrote:
{{blockindent|One thing which Denis and I learned, and appreciated, during those early years of ''My Word!'' was how much the success of the show depended on the inconspicuous skill of the man who compiled it, Edward J. Mason. He had a gift for the common touch which is rare in areas like literary quizzes. He worked within the general awareness of listeners who had been to school; most of his poetic questions were to do with poems in ''[[Palgrave's Golden Treasury]]'', most quotations were semi-familiar and in most books of quotations. We reckoned that 80 per cent of listeners felt that, given a bit of time for thought, they could answer almost 80 per cent of the questions.<ref>Muir, p. 232</ref>|}}
Mason and his successors provided word games and literary quizzes covering vocabulary, etymology, snippets of poetry, and the like. In many series the opening round consisted of obscure words for the panellists to define: examples ranged from such words as auscultation, bumblepuppy, cabless and crinkum-crankum to defenestration, hebetude, hobbledehoy and katydid to lallation, macaronic, palmiped and rahat lokum, or scrimshaw, tatterdemalion, unau and widdershins.<ref name=gbcc/>{{refn|''auscultation'': listening, with ear or stethoscope, to the sound of the movement of heart, lungs, or other organs; ''bumblepuppy'': a game played with bats or rackets in which two players strike a ball attached to a post by a string in opposite directions; ''cabless'': unable to get a taxi; ''crinkum-crankum'': full of twists and turns; ''defenestration'': being thrown from a window; ''hebetude'': dullness; ''hobbledehoy'': a clumsy or awkward youth; ''katydid'': an American grasshopper; ''lallation'': a speech impediment in which the letter "r" is sounded as "l"; ''macaronic'': describing a burlesque form of verse in which vernacular words are mixed with those of another language; ''palmiped'': web-footed; ''rahat lokum'': Turkish delight; ''scrimshaw'': ivory or bone, decorated with engraved designs; ''tatterdemalion'': a ragamuffin; ''unau'': the South American two-toed sloth; ''widdershins'': anticlockwise. (OED)|group=n}}

In the final round, each team was asked to give the origin of a famous phrase or quotation. In early shows, once the real answers were given, Muir and Norden were invited to explain the origin of the phrase less seriously, in the form of a [[feghoot]]. An early example was the quotation "Dead! And never called me mother!" from a stage adaptation of ''[[East Lynne]]'', which became the exclamation of a youth coming out of a [[telephone booth|public telephone box]] which he had discovered to be out of order.<ref name=fm>Muir, pp. 210–215</ref> Later the first part of the round was dropped in favour of having the chairman simply announce the accepted origin of each phrase, thus opening up new fields of phrases that would have been too well known or too obscure to be posed as questions. In later series Muir and Norden chose their own phrases in advance of each programme, and their stories became longer and more convoluted.<ref name=fm/>

The stories became a popular segment of the quiz. Examples included Norden's tale in which a young woman and a young man found themselves happily trapped in a sauna despite earlier assurances from the landlord that the faulty lock had been repaired: "Least said, soonest mended" became "Lease said sauna's mended".<ref name=m212>Muir, pp. 212–213</ref> In another, "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip" became a story about [[Édouard Manet]] in a drunken doze in a beauty spot between a carp pond and Lover's Leap – "There's Manet asleep 'twixt the carp and the leap".<ref name=m212/> In another, Muir confessed to forging fan letters purportedly from [[Monica Dickens]], [[Val Gielgud]], [[Asa Briggs]] and [[Fay Compton]], so that "I am monarch of all I survey" became "I am Monica, Val, Asa, Fay".<ref>[https://archive.org/details/bbcmyword/Acardiac.mp3 BBC TS Transcription] at 21m 29s</ref> A Norden story explaining "Charity shall cover the multitude of sins" became a lament for his diminishing capacity for alcohol and consequent need to enunciate extremely carefully after drinking spirits: "Clarity shall cover the multitude of gins".<ref>Muir and Norden, p. 13</ref>