Wordle Postgame Report, June 15: PRIMO, 3/6
The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of a past game of Wordle, the five-letter-word guessing game now owned by the New York Times. If you do not play Wordle, Indignity encourages you to please skip this item. The existence of the Wordle Postgame Report does not constitute an endorsement of playing Wordle, of not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.
The thing I did just before sitting down to Wordle was to put away a bag of potting soil in the storage box out on the balcony, so I opened with PATIO. With basically undeserved luck for me, that set down the P and the O, with the I floating somewhere in between. It also ruled out PINTO or PIANO or anything else I could think of right away—the kind of block that feels frustrating but also means that you're likely already in the endgame. If I could find a word that worked at all, I might get it in two.
Scratch paper got me through PL, PS, PE, and PH before I got to PRIMO. But was PRIMO a proper Wordle answer? It felt like a crossword-puzzle word, short on the foursquare obviousness of the canonical Wordle answers. It smelled of garlic and hair oil. I looked at the competing word-skeleton, P I _ _ O, and immediately now I saw PINKO.
Some circuits in the background of my mind did note that PINKO was just as crossword-y and disreputable as PRIMO, and that it also probably ran afoul of the Times rules against slurs or controversy. But the idea of not-PRIMO had too much momentum. I played PINKO. It was PRIMO. Bad guess. Bad word.
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