Pig Face

Carpobrotus sp. - Ice plant,
by Linda De Volder,
CC BY-NC-ND

I am not a terribly competitive person, and I attribute that in a big way to my mother. She was a single parent and I was an only child, so we played a lot of board games with only two people. Most board games that are designed “for 2-X players” are really designed for four people. That seems to be the sweet spot where it takes a good amount of time to play without feeling like it was over too quickly or took too fast.

We always just took our time with the games – winning be damned. We played every game until you could no longer play it. There were no more cards to pick up, no more pieces to place, no more matches to make.

Where most people treated board games as a competition, we treated them as a cooperative puzzle, working together to “solve” it as far as it could be solved.

But there were a few games that leant themselves to a bit of competitive argy bargy. Mostly card games like Skip-Bo (which I recently learned was developed from a game called “Spite and Malice”) and the like. In order to play the game and get rid of your cards, you sometimes have to get in the way of the other person getting rid of their cards.

When we were playing these more competitive games, my mother and I came up with comically ludicrous insults to call each other when someone thwarted the other person’s move. My mother’s favourite to use was “pig face”.

What neither of us knew at the time, was that pigface is actually a flower. It’s a native Australian groundcover that does quite well in salty, coastal environments – particularly in northern New South Wales, but around that subtropical area of the coast is its sweet spot. I’m a bit far north, but I’m thinking of buying some for my garden.

It can be so hard to adequately insult people. You never know when you’re accidentally calling them a charming little flower.