According to this web site, one of the things you are encouraged to do on National Spaghetti Day is “Think Outside The Box.” They mean you should make your own pasta instead of buying a long, rectangular carton, but for a split second I thought the game of Spaghetti was beginning to attract a wider audience. Because when it comes to thinking outside the box, spaghetti (the pasta) has nothing on Spaghetti (the improbable word game we are about to play).

In a moment, I will give you five words. I selected them from an abridged dictionary with the help of a random number generator. Being entirely random, there is no way these five words could possibly constitute the elements of a puzzle. And yet, we are going to pretend otherwise.

That’s the game of Spaghetti in a nutshell:

• Here is something that — let us be absolutely clear about this — is NOT A PUZZLE.
• Solve it anyway.

Hence the thinking outside the box. Successful Spaghetti players will find patterns and parallels among these words that would never occur to a more straightforward thinker. The best players will cause you to doubt that the words were randomly chosen in the first place (they were). The VERY best players will cause you to doubt their sanity.

Whether or not you can solve this year’s Spaghetti, I invite you to stick around. Keep yourself updated on the comments, and give a Like to any entry you enjoy. (Multiple votes are not only allowed, they are encouraged.) At the end of the day, whoever gets the most Likes will be the winner.

Oh, yes, one more thing: If you need a sixth word to help you realize your Spaghetti vision, feel free to add it.

All right. Brace yourself. Here are the words for this year’s game:

AUGUR
LAW
PARLIAMENT
MASCULINE
IRRECOVERABLE

Good luck! (Note that if you’ve never commented on this blog before, you might get stuck in the moderation queue. I’ll get those approved as fast as I can.)