Tag: Connections

The New York Times games

Spelling Bee

Wordle 1300I will note the New York Times games my wife and I play daily at our house. As I’ve mentioned, I play Wordle and have a decent streak; my wife does, too, although not as long as mine. It’s the game we play first; sometimes, I play right after midnight.

In the last report, I thought I could get 100 2s before I could get 100 6s. That didn’t work out. Still, in the previous 100 games, I got zero 1s (and it may always be thus because I start with the same word), eight 2s, 49 3s, 31 4s, 10 5s, and two 6s fairly early on. 

The Connections game involves grouping “words that share a common thread.” We play it together after she comes home from work. Our strategy is to figure out all four groups – yellow, green, blue, and purple in increasing difficulty before entering any of them. We’re seeking the reverse rainbow, with the purple first. Sometimes we only know what three of them are. So we try the fourth one blindly; more often than not, it’s purple. 

Trying to get them all minimizes the misleading clues—Harp, Chic, Grouch, Marx—which suggested the Marx Brothers but were not.

Spelling Bee

But the thing that takes us the most amount of time is the Spelling Bee. There are seven letters, one of which you must use, and you’re supposed to make words of four letters or longer.

There is always at least one pangram, which is a word that uses all seven letters. A perfect pangram uses only the seven letters. My wife is very good at finding pangrams. The only pangram I remember getting was genealogy, which I saw right away, only because I’ve been doing genealogy recently.

She is generally better at word games than I am, so it’s her game; I’m just the helper.  There’s no way I would ever finish it, but she has finished it on her own. We spend way more time on Spelling Bee than Wordle and Connections combined.

I suppose it is a team-building project, and we learned many more words. One of the things about Spelling Bee is that you need to remember the words that popped up a few days ago because they’re likely to reappear. They like Greek letters.

Working on prefixes and suffixes and building them onto existing words is essential. But it’s also helpful to look at possible three-letter words that you can extend, or words that end in E, when it’s not a chosen letter, but the expanded word works. For instance, CHANGE isn’t an option, but CHANGING could be.

Lydster: Echolalia

the most hunted person

My daughter suggested that perhaps I have echolalia. What is that? “Echolalia is the repetition of words or phrases spoken by someone else. Children use echolalia as they learn how to communicate. It usually resolves by age 3, but may be a sign of developmental delay or an underlying condition if it continues or appears during adulthood. It’s common with autism spectrum disorder and Tourette syndrome.”

My daughter has a friend who is self-described as experiencing echolalia. But the situation where she attributed it to me doesn’t track. She or my wife said something about an Impossible Hot Dog my daughter was having for dinner. Naturally, I responded, “And four white mice could never be four white horses. ” It’s a non-repetitive response.

I’ve been doing this for decades. When my mother would request, “Help me,” I might reply, “And I do appreciate you being ’round.” It was usually a musical lyric response to a Beatles or Motown lyric.

Over the last quarter century, it tended to be more likely a musical, such as West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Hamilton, or a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein. The above reference is to the song Impossible from R & H’s television production of 1965’s Cinderella.

So I’m not buying the echolalia diagnosis.

Game on!

Still, she is very bright. My wife and I were doing the NYT Connections on June 26, and our daughter connected Lovelace, Bojack, McQueen, and Hawking as words with playing cards as the second syllable. We all knew instantly it had to be the purple (most difficult) answer, and it was.

Right before that, the Final JEOPARDY response popped up.  In the category 20th CENTURY FIGURES: Ironic in light of her name, she was remembered in a eulogy as “the most hunted person of the modern age.” 

One contestant replied (Who was) Sanger, presumably Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement. One wrote Found, but Ken Jennings declared, “I’m afraid there’s no such person” (as Hunted and Found). The third player had no answer, but with a locked game, didn’t need to.

I was thinking of someone like Mata Hari, but my daughter immediately thought of Princess Diana; I had my doubts. But sure enough, Jennings noted, “If being hunted made you think of the goddess of the hunt, you might have thought of Diana, Princess of Wales.”

My daughter gleefully said, “You’d better put this in your blog!” I probably would have anyway…

Ramblin' with Roger
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