I’ve always loved word games–Scrabble, Bananagrams, word finds, crosswords…so when I saw people posting about Wordle I went to check it out. I was immediately hooked. I’ve played it every day since that first day, and I’ve actually gotten it every day since then except one. It happened to be the day that the New York Times took it over, and they must not have had everything right in the transfer of ownership because it still shows that I have 100% wins. While I like how that looks, I know it’s not accurate, so it bugs me a little.
I’ve also had a little help from The Bearded One here and there, who apparently has some fancy relationship with the universe that gives him prescience to what the Wordle of the day is going to be. He almost always guesses a word to start with that has at least a few of the letters of the answer, often in the right place. One time he guessed POLAR and the word was SOLAR, so he got that one in two guesses. He even guessed correctly ON HIS FIRST TRY once. There hasn’t been a day yet that I got it in fewer guesses than he did, so I’ve asked him for a hint once or twice when I was down to my last guess.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed Wordle-ing, and I’ve also enjoyed the camaraderie it has generated among friends on social media who also play. One friend even started a Wordle Support Group on social media for us all to commiserate about Wordle and its countless offshoots. I’ve played several of those as well, but the only ones I play regularly are Quordle (four Wordles at the same time!) and Nerdle (a version with math equations instead of a word to figure out). And I enjoy seeing how others are experiencing the same things I am.
There’s something about collective experiences that’s been missing in society lately, I think. Other than the pandemic, we haven’t had a lot of things that most of us experience together. And even including the pandemic, we don’t have a lot of collective experiences that we feel or react to in the same ways. But with Wordle, we’ve all been there where we had a good guess and were able to get the right word in just a couple/few tries. And we’ve also all had times where we didn’t get the word, or at least almost didn’t get it.
I wish we could collectively experience other things. Significant things. Honestly, I think we’ve all experienced the same emotions, even if they didn’t come from the same kind of event. We all feel sadness and joy, fear and confidence. We’ve all had times that were difficult and times that seemed so good we couldn’t fully enjoy them because we knew they couldn’t last forever.
I just hope we can get to a point in society where we remember each others’ humanity again. Because even though we have wildly different beliefs about things, we’re all human. And, though we’ve experienced similar feelings, we’ve come by them in very different ways. I just always try to remember that when dealing with others–we don’t fully know why they’ve come to be the way they are, just as they don’t know why we developed into the people we did.
That got kind of intense but I don’t want to end this with a feeling of despair so, on the advice of The Bearded One, I made a Wordle for my readers! I don’t know how long this link will be active, but give it a shot if you want–it was the most random 5-letter word I could think of late on a Sunday night, and I think it’s a pretty tricky one! https://mywordle.strivemath.com/?word=xcljs
growingmoxie.com 