Starting a New Day—Going Sideways
But that's okay
Like a lot of people, I have routines. One of them is playing word games in the morning.
I play all the same ones, all in the same way, maximizing their linguistic synergy — the Mini crossword, Spelling Bee, Connections, Wordle, Letter Boxed, and Strands. The most crucial part of this sequence is Spelling Bee to Connections because from the latter game I use a five-letter word as my starter word for Wordle.
This had all been going great until today, when I opened Connections and discovered the symbols shown below. Well, I thought, I am f — cked for Wordle now!
What to do? I didn’t even recognize some of the symbols.
I mean, what is that Y with the equals sign at the intersection of the letter’s v-shape and trunk? Or that C that also has an equals sign through its middle as if it’s been gut-punched? And how about that right-angle oddment?
I bet my father — engineer and all-around good egg-head — would have some answers. But it was way too early toss out a lifeline call to him.
I thought about researching each symbol, thinking that perhaps the name of one of them would be a handy five-letter word. But, as intimated above, I did not know what most of these symbols represented. Therefore, I had no words for them. With no words, I could not research them.
You may have noticed by now that I had completely lost the point of Connections — to group the symbols into four sets where the symbols in each set relate to, or connect with, each other.
That’s how badly I was thrown by this morning’s game. My problem had become not how to solve Connections but how to begin Wordle.
So how would I do it? I know what you may be thinking — don’t I have a regular Wordle starter word, something like adieu, or teams, or meats? Well, no, I don’t, because even though I have routines I like to vary them, and having a different starter word for Wordle every day accomplishes that.
Getting no help from Connections, I thought to consider words from some of the other games I play. Strands had none to offer. Neither did Letter Boxed.
That left me with Spelling Bee. I chose going, which did not have much going for it — only two vowels and consonants that are not as common as other consonants such as r, s, and t.
Plus, two of the consonants were g. As if I were not feeling challenged enough! But r, s, and t were not among Spelling Bee’s letters so words using those letters was not an option.
As you can see from the image below, going was not an optimum choice. The day’s word included none of its letters.
But this liberated me to make another moonshot — belly — a marginal improvement but still enough, and soon enough, to give me some wiggle room to solve day’s puzzle on my fifth attempt, as the image below shows. I also added another day to my current streak.
What about Connections, you may be wondering, the game that began on this madness? Well, I let it go. I had only a two-day streak there anyway.
Then I remembered that today is April Fool’s — that probably explains the symbols. Ha, ha, very funny. Then it occurred to me that the Times Games editors pulled the same stunt last year — I seem to remember something like that.
In any case, I also reflected on the fact that if this is going to be my biggest hassle of the day, that would be just fine with me —no joking about that, at all.
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Keeping it simple? That never occurs to me. Haha. But I didn't know gmail came with a crossword account. I may need to check that out.
I totally screwed up connections, although I did get the yellow and blue correct. I knew some of the symbols that you did not, but that comes from living abroad for so long. Wordle took me five tries as well.