Headscratchers / WordWorld

• Why do Word Friends even have genders? If the letters are all that's needed to give life, what's the point of having a gender?
  • Well, there was that episode when Bird laid an egg, and the Word Friends watched it for her. So, I guess they are capable of making a baby either way.
    • Which just raises further uncomfortable questions.
  • English does have gendered words (boy, girl, etc.)—maybe their concept of gender developed from those being built, or got molded into a familiar form through features like gendered pronouns?
• What I don't get is the Earth Day episode. They don't have factories, the planet is sparsely populated, they don't need to cut down, mine, or burn anything. They don't have cars, just one train that comes in and out to occasionally deliver letters. And they sure as Hell don't need to worry about running out of letters. They have so many, that Dog uses them to fill his pool! And if they were running out, all they'd have to do is put an "S" at the end of a word and have millions of copies of the word to pull apart and have more of the letter they want.
  • Likewise.
  • They want to promote eco-friendliness
• Am I the only one genuinely disturbed by the fact that they're made of letters but also make food and other crap with letters? It's like if we lived in a world where everything was made of disembodied body parts and random organs.
  • Except when things aren't. I don't see the big grassy field labeled "Field" or "Grass", unless the letters are really big. Another thing that makes me scratch my noggin' is that if they have one letter of a different color from the others, it morphs to the majority color on formation of a word.
  • You can sort of think of it like how we're made out of atoms, and so is everything else
• What happens if you build a word that's not a noun? Adjectives, verbs, etc.
  • It doesn’t do anything unless you put it in front of a object to enhance it. For example Adjectives like BIG in front of HAT makes it grow into a BIG HAT. The same can be said for Verbs like FAST CAR.
• What about intangible objects? What about proper nouns?
  • Intangible objects are fair play. There are plenty of Written Sound Effect-like particle effects, like dust and splashes.
  • Proper nouns may well be canon. Frog (who already blurs the line) has a model solar system where Uranus is spelled out, suggesting the real one is as well.
  • What about abstract concepts?
• Does Word World have Law of Conservation of Mass? Like, can you multiply words by adding the letter "S" to the end? Or if you build the word "nothing", will the letters just disappear (like how in Scribblenauts, adding the adjective "nonexistent" will make objects disappear)?
  • The book Dog's Birthday Party is actually specifically about making more of things by adding "S" at the end.
    • Never saw that one; thanks for informing me. So it is possible...
• Why aren't "background" objects built out of words? The grass, the road, the sky, etc. I mean, ex-universe this is obviously so for viewer comfort, but then that begs the question, what happens if you build the words "grass", "road", or "sky"? Or more alarmingly, "planet", "tornado", or "black hole"?
  • It's possible that to build a word, you must be able to 'physically' make the object you're creating. Hence anyone is capable of building 'Bed' or 'Nest', but only the Scientist Frog can make complex machines, and people still go to Chef Pig for food.
  • Speaking of "black hole", can you even build two-letter words?
    • Yes, there's a train station and a treasure chest, both words included in each.
  • This bugged me too. I think objects that aren't words are usually just parts of words, or created along with them. Maybe the landscape belongs to a larger biome that is a word (like the jungle). One caveat—WordWorld itself doesn't seem to be a word, unlike even other celestial bodies…
  • Okay, so in "Dog Wants to Play Ball", a bubble turns from a WordThing to a letterless one as it passes out of Frog's machine. Whatever is going on there could have something to do with background objects. We also see that words like water and rope can flow and contort out of their initial shape, so maybe the landscape started out as words that grew unrecognizable through erosion and the like. And another, less satisfying possibility is that WordThings are just a special kind of thing, not the only kind.
• How does Pig drop Gratuitous French in a world whose very physics are based on English spelling? How "real" are other languages to them? Are there letters beyond the 26 that just never get brought up in the show? Other scripts and writing systems entirely? Would a capital Greek alpha be interchangeable with a capital Latin A?