Wordle Pitfall

I missed a Wordle. I am embarrassed and chagrined. It happened a week or so ago, and I can only now bring myself to write about it. Actually, there were major stories regarding the House chaos in trying to elect a Speaker; and Prince Harry’s book; and the floods in California, so I thought that my Wordle adventures did not amount to a hill of beans.in this crazy world.

Where have I heard that phrase before? If you want to read a really enjoyable book that will take you to another time and place, it is Aljean Harmetz”s “Round Up the Usual Suspects,” all about the making of the film “Casablanca,” She used to write for the Los Angeles Times newspaper, and I always liked her pieces. Then she wrote this book, and one about the making of “The Wizard of Oz” Her research is excellent, and she writes with intelligence and charm.

Well, that helped me to delay writing about my wordle miss for a paragraph. Actually, I have only missed three wordles in about 350 tries, which might sound like I am praising myself while pretending to be critical. No, I absolutely hate to miss getting one of these, and I am a lot better at word games than knowing how to work a computer or any technical device, where I would not even want to tell you about all the difficulties I have. So I had better be able to do well in a some areas.

Okay, the word I missed was “layer.,” on January. 4. It seems like an easy word! But for me, at least, it was very difficult, for two reasons. First, it had the dreaded (for me) – a – e r. The same sequence that caused me to miss “parer.” There are so many word possibilities, from baker to pacer to taper to waver. Second, I made a foolish mistake by not trying a word with an L in my third or fourth guess. My third guess helped me to get the – a – e r order. But an L would have guaranteed that I would have gotten the word, as I am sure that most here did.

So with – a – e r, I had the bright idea to try “carer,” thinking that a repeated letter was a possibility, and so “rarer” would have been a very tricky answer, and “carer” would cover that, and a c in the word. Nope,. no c, and no r in the third posiition.

Then I thought that a w was very possible, with wafer or waver, or even a w as third letter, with pawer. or even cawer. I tried waver to test the w and the v, but neither was a letter in the word.

Suddenly I am looking at one more guess, and I thought k could well be the third letter, as in baker or maker. Baker was a recent word, so I tried maker, and that was wrong, and no little green dancing figures to herald a successful game. Blah.

The L would have easily done it. But even so, you will admit, won’t you????, that – a – e r is a dreadful sequence for a wordle player? I ask you this: If the word were waver or waxer or faxer or vaxer, or faker or laker, would you have gotten it? Yes, laker is apparently a word; the mascot of a college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I think, shows a drawing of what looks like an 18th or 19th century man of French ancestry, steering a boat on a lake, so that was apparently a term used then; and how that school got its nickname which was also the name of the Minneapolis, later Los Angeles, Lakers. How did I know hat? Because I was looking up some team in a small college playoff game, and their nickname was the Lakers, and I wanted to see what their mascot looked like.

But the word wasn’t laker, or lager or lamer or laxer, it was layer. And I missed it. I battled back with sleek, belie, lemon, opera, pixie. grimy, sedan, human, (well, a couple of them were a bit hard), but it did not make up for missing layer. I do have a little excuse, that I was watching the House voting, and I wasn’t concentrating enough, but a good Wordle player must surmount such things.

At least,I will try to develop a strategy for the next time that Wordle comes up with that darn – a – e r!

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