A Crucial Topic: Wordle!
As we stand on the brink of world calamity, with threats of Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, Climate Stasis, and the Great White Threat of Canadian totalitarianism rising up on the one border remining to the republic, not to mention whispered fear-choked rumors of an upcoming sequel to Ms. Marvel or a remake of Snow White, this writer believes now is the time to address an issue of far more moment and import:
New York Times WORDLE game: WOOT!! GOT IT IN TWO GUESSES TODAY!
For those of you who do not know, Wordle is a simple online game to guess a five-letter word in six tries. Letters turn gold if they are in the word, green if in the correct position. New game each day.
https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
Yes, it was mostly luck, but I am elated unduly nonetheless, and wanted to tell any random passers-by who thought this blog only deals with weighty topics like economics, theology, philosophy, art and Space Princess dress codes in pulp novels.
Also: What are the best opening words?
Yes, I have written on this highly controversial topic before, and suffered uncomfortable confrontations with Alt-Wordle and Far Wordist partisans, whose opinions are threatening, dangerous, and uncouth. But I think it only fair to admit, tearfully and in public, that an approach that front-loads more commons letter-choices in more common positions, may be the wiser tactic than what I have previously advised.
I previously adopted a brute-force “twenty-five letters in five-words” approach, leaving me only one guess. This had the disadvantage of leaving me prey to anagrams: SPATE might be PASTE or TAPES or TEPAS, for example.
Convinced by mathematicians and various cyborgs who replaced their human brains with computers to adopt an approach that would maximize not just the most likely letters, but their most likely positions, I altered my tactics:
Now I guess
SOARE (Obsolete form of sore, meaning “young hawk”)
CLINT (Not the actor. Scottish for flinty cliff or outcroping)
DUMPY (A description of my silhouette)
At this point, I usually have enough correct letters correctly placed to make a guess to narrow down letter positions, or eliminate possible word choices.
If I do not have enough letters found, I continue with the brute force approach to clear other letters. Again, these words are selected in statistical order of the likelihood of the letter appearing in a five letter word in English:
BROGH (Cornish for badger)
WAKFS (In Islamic law, a mortmain or irrevocable pledge of land as a religious tithe.)
This exhausts all letters save vzxq & j — which are the least likely to appear in any five letter word in English. Usually, if you have narrowed it down to two possibilities, these unlikely letters are not involved.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
