June 26, RUSTY, 4/6
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.
ONE AFTERNOON IN college, in an annual tradition of the anthropology department, my fellow students and I hunkered down and knapped some sharp pieces off a lump of FLINT, to butcher a goat with. This was for science—the nicked-up bones of the goat would go under a microscope, for researchers to compare to the nicked-up bones of creatures that may have been butchered by prehistoric humans—but also for a cookout. For the amateur, non-prehistoric human, I found, the process of banging rocks together produces blood blisters at about the same rate as it produces usable cutting edges. Technology has always had a learning curve.
Here, FLINT broke off one measly piece of the answer: the T, in yellow. The mustardy yellow of Wordle, I see now, is not far from the color of certain more attractive kinds of FLINT. What could the T be used for? I stuck it at the beginning of THOSE. Still yellow, now joined by a yellow S. Slowly chipping away. STARK? The R joined the S and the T, all of them in yellow. Unless the word ended in -TS (unlikely, given Wordle's rule against plurals in the answer pool), there would need to be vowels on both sides of the T. All the clean, useful vowels were gone, leaving me to make do with U and Y. RUSTY. A slow progression from Stone Age to Iron Age.
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