The rest of the indented code after the colon is the body of your function. The function can optionally return a value with the return keyword. Now there is variable scope business that I have read about and have not played with. More on that later I presume.
Calls to the function can be made after it has been defined. You just reference the function name followed by parentheses. You put any actual values for the parameters within the parentheses. And you can assign the return value of a function, if any, to the left hand side of the function call.
The colon seems to be standard fare in Python. You put it after the function declaration. You also put if after conditional checks and looping constructs. I am going to be kicking it into high gear next, writing a non-trivial game of hangman in Python.
