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Posted by cyanbane 5 days ago

A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words(forkingmad.blog)
133 points | 138 commentspage 3
anshumankmr 4 days ago|
Why not add a character (for fun?) The weekend game can be 6 characters and the regular one 5 characters?
BurningFrog 5 days ago||
I'm surprised they weren't reusing words already.

Obviously a finite resource will run out after a while.

znkynz 5 days ago||
Connections is better anyway.
AndrewDucker 5 days ago||
It's a very different kind of game. I don't think it's at all comparable.
dobladov 5 days ago|||
My favorite right now is https://tiledwords.com/, not affiliated to it in any way, I just enjoy it.
paulhebert 5 days ago||
Hey, thanks! I’m glad you’re enjoying it! (I’m the creator)
abosherid 5 days ago||
It’s become tradition in my house to play tiled words with my wife just before bed. It’s the last thing we do together before falling asleep each night! Thanks for bringing us together with a bit of joy!
paulhebert 5 days ago||
That’s awesome, thanks for letting me know!
AnotherGoodName 5 days ago|||
I recommend anything at https://www.merriam-webster.com/games for these sorts of games. Lots of wordle variations and all add free.
BurningFrog 5 days ago||
I find Quordle a much better game than Wordle, since there is some real strategy involved, but still not overly much.
Lerc 5 days ago||
Connections is infuriating.

Not only are they using regional specific knowledge, but they use regional relative concepts.

Many people do not agree that ant rhymes with aunt.

The recent Homophones of words meaning brutal.

Gorey, Grimm, Grizzly, Scarry.

I am guessin that Grimm is a eponym which makes it nebulous at best, eponyms take a lot of use to be regarded in objective terms rather than as invoking an arbartrary property of the name holder. Kafkaesque rises to that use. I don't think Grimm does.

I have no idea if Scarry is supposed to be a homonym for scary. Which it neither sounds like nor means brutal.

Perhaps there is another word that means brutal that sounds like however the person who makes connections thinks Scarry is pronounced.

In which case it would be a homonym of a synonym of brutal.

I also do not live in the same country as only connect, yet do not have such issues with their walls.

The real problem is that while you might be wrong about an answer, once you lose faith that the puzzle setter is right, you can never be sure if your guess is wrong or they are wrong. It is no longer a puzzle and you are playing 'what have I got in my pocket?'.

wedog6 5 days ago|||
'Grimm' is a homophone of 'grim', 'Grizzly' is a homophobe of 'grisly', 'Scarry' is a homophone in US English of 'scary', 'Gorey' is a homophone of 'gory'.

'Gory', 'grisly', 'grim' and 'scary' do all roughly mean brutal.

'Grimm' as the name of the brothers is a red herring connection, with Gorey and Scarry also names of children's authors.

Lerc 5 days ago||
Gory, grisly and grim can be seen as synonymous on a axis maybe close to brutal. They refer to the appearance. brutal evokes the action that happened. The other words are about how things ended up.

An autopsy can be gory, grisly and depending on circumstances, grim. It is not brutal.

Scary is about a state of mind.

so you have appearance, appearance, appearance, and state-of-mind being considered similar to an action descriptor.

wedog6 4 days ago||
It seems like perhaps the game is not for you, rather than that it is objectively deficient.
jeffgreco 5 days ago|||
Isn't the point of homophones that they sound like the equivalent word, thus gory, grim, grisly, scary?
extra88 5 days ago||
I think the confusion is about what "Gorey, Grimm, Scarry" mean. They, along with "Silverstein" in that game, are last names of children's authors.
Lerc 5 days ago||
And that would be OK as a clue if Silverstein was a red herring, Grizzly was also a children's author and Scarry sounded like scary (and also meant something in the same ballpark as Gory, Grim, and Grisly)
quuxplusone 5 days ago||
Richard Scarry's surname is indeed pronounced "scary," rather than (as I assumed for many years) "scarr-ry."

That is, it rhymes with Harry, Larry, carry, parry, tarry, and marry, rather than... uh, starry, I guess?

quesera 5 days ago||
Where I come from, Scarry rhymes with Harry, but Harry does not rhyme with scary.

  Harry does not rhyme with hairy
  Scarry does not rhyme with scary
  Marry does not rhyme with Mary. Nor with merry!
You can probably triangulate my childhood home with that information. :)
croisillon 5 days ago||
is "valew" related to the Brazilian "valeu", expressing gratitude/satisfaction?
thaumasiotes 5 days ago|
Depends on your point of view.

The most direct thing we can say is "no, because there is no such word as valew". It's not in Merriam-Webster, it's not in Samuel Johnson's 18th-century dictionary, it's not in the Collins dictionary (for British English).

It is in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is noted as a "[spelling] variant of value" from the 14th century. It has never been a word with any other meaning than that of value, and using it now would be a pure error if someone used it, which obviously nobody will ever do. Accepting it in Wordle makes as much sense as accepting vvest on the theory that that was an acceptable spelling of west in the past.

There is an etymological connection between Portuguese valeu and English value, in that they both descend from Latin valeo, but value has no sense of gratitude or satisfaction. (I'm guessing the blog author was misled by https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valew#Portuguese , which says that valew is Portuguese internet slang for valeu.)

croisillon 4 days ago||
thanks a lot!
Aardwolf 5 days ago||
Every now and then I play quordle, octordle, and once a thousand-word variation (which breaks down gameplaywise to just getting every letter at every spot).

A bit of reuse of the same word in the one-word version can't hurt I think

jackgavigan 5 days ago||
Yet the current word list apparently doesn't include "Irish" (even though Welsh, Scots and Brits are all valid). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
arcfour 5 days ago|
It doesn't beg the question, it raises it. Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which you assume the truth of your conclusion. It doesn't mean something "begs for the question to be asked."

I have no idea why this incorrect use of the term drives me so nuts; however, you'd think a blog post about English words and Wordle wouldn't make this mistake.

slibhb 5 days ago||
I agree with you. But it's clear that "begging the question" is going the way of "literally," and there's (sadly) nothing we can do about it.

I suppose some time in the future, someone will invent a new phrase meaning "assuming your conclusion".

viccis 5 days ago|||
At what point did dictionaries providing descriptive views of the English languages turn into a prescriptive one that emboldens people to just point to repeated wrong usage rather than admit they were wrong?
fsckboy 5 days ago||||
assuming your conclusion, why would we need a new phrase?
arcfour 5 days ago|||
Well, I for one won't be party to it. I think informing everyone I can is my drop in the bucket in the fight against the incorrect usage of words. :-)
mauvehaus 5 days ago||
When you win that battle, would you please fight iOS predictive text vs proper apostrophe use next?
Ericson2314 5 days ago||
I think the idea was NYT was trying to imply they were running out.

To me, "begging the question" doesn't mean assuming the conclusion in particular, it just means that some of the premises used are less obvious than they are being passed off as. Assuming the conclusion is merely an especially egregious form of that.

arcfour 5 days ago||
I was objecting to the incorrect use of the phrase at the end of the article.