As regular readers know, I never shy away from difficult, controversial topics, unless it involves going outside when it’s cold. I once wrote a piece that came down firmly and unapologetically in favor of cows, and I even intimated—admittedly within parentheses and in 6-point type—that maybe we shouldn’t so much eat them anymore.
Never one to wait around unless there’s a padded bench nearby, I came out of the Substack chute with both laser pointers blazing. In my very first essay, I took on the corporate behemoth that is Costco, and argued for the installation of actuaries at each checkout stand to keep customers from buying products they clearly won’t outlive. That’s how Costco became a corporate monster in the first place. Way back in 2010, with the stock price at $43, company poobahs realized that because old folks can’t resist a volume-based bargain, if they offered products seniors love in massive sizes, after the geezers croaked there’d be billions of dollars’ worth of overbought merch that would never see the outside of America’s laundry rooms. This past February, the stock hit an all-time high of $1,078.23. Coincidence? Don’t be naïve.
And unlike our current chorus of pusillanimous politicians, I won’t shy away from torching even the richest and most powerful among us. In How to Break Up With a Billionaire (3/7/2023), I burned bridges with everyone from Elon Musk and Bill Gates to the Koch twins and Walton triplets. I felt a slight but indelible tremor in the for-profit cosmos after that one. That my words did not consign capitalism to history’s trash heap just shows the importance of follow-up.
In my continuing effort to take on ever bigger and more daunting targets with no concern for my personal safety, I will now drag Wordle into my aspirationally satirical spotlight. That’s right, that simple, borderline simplistic game you can’t truly start your day without completing successfully or your ego takes such a hit that going back to bed seems the only reasonable course of action. Somehow the fact that Wordle appears in the New York Times gives it gravitas it deserves about as much as Art Garfunkel deserves credit for Graceland.
My 10-minute morning game routine consists of, in order, Wordle, Worldle (geography), Quordle, Octordle, and Blossom, an NYT spelling bee knock off that you don’t need a paid account to play. It’s not the money that keeps me from signing up; it’s a principle I hope someday to identify. I almost always start my Wordles with the same first and second words: Irate and Lousy, both to determine the target word’s vowel content and because that whole positive affirmation and energy first thing in the morning thing just doesn’t work for me. I have recently re-embraced Tradle—a game offered by the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an organization neither of us has time to fully explore now or likely ever—which asks you to identify the featured country based on its exports, which is weirdly illuminating.
I am among the millions worldwide who enjoy playing Wordle every day, but I have tired of the unwarranted self-esteem candy it hands out like oily praise at a Trump cabinet meeting. I’ll admit to liking likes as much as the next guy, but repetitive, unimaginative praise from a bot, even one from the Old Grey Lady, fails to move my needle.
For example, if the first word you enter is in fact the correct answer, you’ve hit a 1-in-15,000 shot, and for this, Wordle proclaims you a “Genius.” If this is a joke, it’s dumb, and if it isn’t, it’s even dumber. Get it in two, you’re “Magnificent,” three is “Impressive,” four is “Splendid,” five is “Great,” and six is “Phew.” There’s a lot to unpack here, and since my default method of unpacking is just to fling everything skyward and sort it out later, let’s dive right in. Splendid is objectively higher praise than Impressive, so at the very least those two must be switched. I know tons of people who are impressive, and even though I’ll cop to being easily impressed, I know precious few who are truly splendid. And I’ve seen garbage dumps that were irrefutably impressive but I didn’t want to go near any of them, while splendid stuff is inherently magnetic.
I don’t think any of us really feel so Great if we get it in five, and there’s way too big a gap o’ praise between Great and Phew. Also, it’s the goddamn New York Times, so wouldn’t you think maybe they’d offer something a bit more imaginative than the same six adjectives in praise perpetuity? How about mixing things up a little, like make one week 1980s slang: tubular, righteous, bodacious, and wicked, or kick it back to the 1890s, with swell, dandy, the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow, and presumably the dog’s pancreas and the turtle’s gallbladder. Or how about throwing in some non sequiturs to give the process some much-needed randomness, like furry, alkaline, and gelatinous, or irreligious, bilateral, and porcine.
The Wizards of Wordle are, like one of my favorite Western swing bands, asleep at the wheel. I understand, it happens to the best of us. You explode onto the zeitgeist by capturing the imagination of a small but influential sub-group—NYT word nerds—then rise like Miley Cyrus to the rarified air of cultural iconicity, for which you are utterly unprepared. And as with virtually everything in life—especially in the second quarter of the first century of the new millennium—getting to the top is easier than staying there, as Wordle is finding out. We’re a fickle lot, we online AM word gamers, with our oat milk lattes, avocado toast, and 9:30 Zoom staff meetings. It wasn’t so very long ago we rocked almond milk lattes, avocado smoothies, and 9:30 staff meetings in person for fuck’s sake.
First the Sunday NYT crossword puzzle slipped to Wednesday-level difficulty, and now I think Wordle is losing its edge as well. Yesterday I got it in two, as after my opening Irate I had the I, R, and E all in the wrong place, and so I thought for not nearly as long as I should have had to, and remembered a short but intense Kefir period I had about a year ago when it was having a moment, owing to its massive array of probiotics, and went in pretty confident that the Wordle bot would 1) think that I would never think of Kefir, and 2) even if I did there’s no way I could be sure it wasn’t a proper noun, and sure enough, Kefir it was. Even though in a couple of minutes I came up with 16 other possible options.
And so in closing, Wordle, I think you can do better. We all need to do at least a little bit better these days to beat back the powerful forces that want us all to be worse. People need constancy more than ever, and you are an important daily reminder that if we apply ourselves we can still overcome any obstacle, provided it’s no more than than five letters long.
