“Gamy” carries six senses under one roof: the flavor of game meat, meat gone slightly off, plain rank, sordid, racy, and plucky — all traced to “game,” the hunted animal and the fighting spirit, first recorded in 1820. Despite the look of it, none of that connects to the “-gamy” of monogamy or bigamy, which comes from the Greek gamos, marriage. Wordsmith calls the pileup of meanings “a kind of lexical polygamy” — a joke the word can’t actually make about itself.