At least this was the case in a New Year's Eve game of Scrabble. (No points for commenting on the calibre of my social life either!)

Back to the game, my 10-year-old had added the prefix "DA" to my word already on the board "CROW" before proudly announcing "DACROW" and straight away setting about tallying her word score.

"Whoa back Wordsworth, I'm not convinced," I say.

"Use it in a sentence."

Without hesitation she replies: "Dacrow flew over da house!"

"See, it's a word. Yay! Double word score for me. Totes cool!"

Still far from sold, I threw it open to my 15-year-old niece, who was also party to the Scrabble stoush. Perhaps she would translate the Millennial lingo.

"Sorry, I can't say I've heard of it," she says.

"Can we look it up?"

My tween was not keen on that idea one bit: "Seriously, that won't be necessary Mother and best cousin of mine!"

Google wanted to know if she had meant "darrow" or "dacron".

"Nope," she says.

"I did not mean darrow or DA-CRON."

I reply: "And by 'nope', did you actually mean 'no'?" 

"Nope!" she says."I meant nope and dacrow."

By now, I was worried we'd still be arguing this point for the rest of the year; the Albury Harness Racing Club fireworks were just four hours away by this stage.

Luckily dinner was a timely distraction but DACROW stayed menacingly in place on the Scrabble board in the middle of the coffee table.

Like the superior-headline-come-too-late-for-the-print-issue that often wakes me from a deep sleep about 2am, a new word occurred to me just before the New Year was in.

"What about CROWD?" I say to my now-sleepy daughter, out of the blue.

"What about CROWD?" she says.

"As in, three's a crowd, in Scrabble," I explain.

"Three's not a crowd," she says.

"It's hardly even a party!"

On New Year's Day, I was relieved to see DACROW had flown back into the Scrabble box along with all of the other tiles.

Since then we've rediscovered the speedier game of Boggle for the whole gang.

We could get five games in, in the same time it took to cook spaghetti.

Even our five-year-old could pick out some words, but as she scored herself 100 points a word no one could catch her.

Using conventional scoring, our eldest won about half of the Boggle games against her journalistic elders.

When it came to the tiebreaker round earlier this week, I told her not to try on any made-up words like, say, for example, “dacrow”.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

Alas her winning word was: “APP”.

And it is in the Macquarie Dictionary gifted to us as a wedding present almost 17 years ago. I checked.

Turns out “app” has been a word for positively yonks.

Whether words are your work or play thing, the oldest games in the book are a welcome distraction from the green glow of school holiday screen-time.

For me, that spells S-U-C-C-E-S-S.