June 16, APRON, 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.
I THOUGHT OF a really pleasing starter word before going to bed and completely forgot what it was by morning, so I went with FLARE and got two yellow letters on the A and the R. This was more useful than it looked at first: R tends to be part of a consonant cluster, but the A couldn't be in the center of the word, so that cluster probably wasn't balanced against some other cluster. The target would have some sort of lopsided pattern.
Where would the weight go? Holding onto the idea of the A as a fulcrum, I shifted it leftward with WARTY. The R went green; A stayed yellow. I half-thought about something-vowel-R-A-something, or words ending in A, but that felt like too much work to start shuffling through just yet. First, move the A to the left again, as the opening of the word. Now which consonant would want to cluster with the R there? T was already gone, next candidate over on the keyboard—P. APRON! APRON? APRON. 3/6. Completely reasonable and specific word, concrete mental image to go with it, efficient path to get there. Enjoyable game.
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