Wordle Postgame Report, September 7

GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE DEP'T.

Six northern elephant seal pups are released back into the wild Wednesday at Point Reyes by volunteers from the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. Some seemed eager to return to the ocean, while others were a little LEERY of leaving their cage or preferred to bask in the sun and catch a few z's. Four of the seals were rehabilitated at the San Francisco Zoo. Photo: Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images.

September 7, LEERY, 6/6

The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of a 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. The existence of the Wordle Postgame Report does not constitute an endorsement of playing Wordle, not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.

DO THE STARTERS need to be good Wordle answers? TAPIR seemed more like an exotic crossword-puzzle solution, but I tried it, and got a yellow R. I moved the R and tried something more normal with FRESH, but only added a green E to the still-yellow R. Oscillating back to the unusual, I tried QUERY: the -ERY went green; the QU- did not. Did this mean that playing the Q had been basically the right thing to do, in principle? If the word structure was right, then any letters that fit it were equally valid guesses, weren't they? Or should letter frequency still guide the choices? Either way, here I was, running out of consonant combinations. Assume another E would be in there—could be BEERY, could be LEERY, neither one was a great Wordle word. VEERY was surely too ornithologically specific to be a Wordle answer, but! EVERY. It clicked into place mentally, such a nice, standard piece of vocabulary. On the board, however, it came up with a yellow E and a gray V. Back to the EE words, and running out of rows. Which kind of bad answer would it be, fusty or slovenly? I went with sloppy good times and BEERY, and missed. Last chance. LEERY would have to be it, I thought apprehensively. I didn't trust it, but I didn't see anything else.

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