Tomtit in the tilth -- the NY TIMES SPELLING BEE thread

:) I have been primed to think about Italian foods. I got tortoni and rotini today.

To be complete you have to scour for every element in the table of elements and every bone in the body and its latin plural, although other common medical words like prion and embolize are ignored

sorry, didn't mean to reveal those words

ha those were the 2 i was missing to get queen be (i had long given up and would never have quested tortoni)

focaccia is fine imo but tortoni and rotini.... cmon

yeah i find raer foreign food words kinda start to blur the line of proper noun. also where the game shows its ass re: western-centrism

yeah why is miso accepted, but not mirin?

or nori!

yesterday's frankly a murderer's row of bullshit words that are only ever encountered in the spelling bee

And yet a bunch that would be perfectly good in Scrabble or an NYT crossword weren't. So it goes. My earlier assessment stands (that any one curator would probably yield the same complaints).

To Dan S.'s list of things to try I would add animals generally. Many times I struggle with common household words but can come up with shit like "okapi" or whatever.

Miso? That has an S though!

I've only been playing this a week or so and am so frustrated by the words that are not in the previous list!

Precious list, not previous. Ugh!

Miso? That has an S though!

Ah you’re right we never get S’s - I think i was mixing it up with my nyt crossword words lol

anyway the point was mirin should totally be in the list, as should nori!

I agree that MIRIN should be accepted, especially since UDON is a regular word in SB.

today's omissions included undaunted

and untenanted >:[

today's omissions included undaunted

― Dan S, Thursday, October 14, 2021 2:59 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i literally thought i was going nuts so tried it a second time. still can't believe that omission.

xp I couldn't even think of tenant

And exudate!

This is the problem with a hand curated word list, omissions like undaunted are bound to happen.

Ugly letters today, I got spoiled on two words and I didn't even mind it.

Yeah I got to Genius and am stuck with 22 words in. Feels like there should be more in there, but there just aren't.

there were only a few words that had more than 5 letters. I got chichi, archaic and harridan but couldn't get the pangram today arachnid or anarchic

as far as puzzles go, I'm getting much better at the NYT hard sudoku and the LAT expert sudoku. The LAT impossible sudoku is still a challenge, because it requires visualiziing multiple moves in advance to solve it

I've been doing the NYT hard sudoku too! I think today's will stymie me though.

I got QB today, which is much more tractable than yesterday's, even though 2-4 of the words imo stretch the definition of common.

I feel like a DUNCE for falling one word short of yesterday's QB.

When you get to QB, does it change from Genius so you know? Because it seems unlikely I will get to that point and see it in person.

i think it’s the first time i got to genius without discovering a single 4 letter

xp yep a little graphic screen and everything

Nice! Something to strive for

QB status mostly eludes me. I usually do these in the morning. I get to Genius and stop. By the next morning I forget where my mind was, what avenues I'd pursued, and what I'd tried and hadn't tried, so seeing the answers the next day isn't very illuminating.

An exception: a few days ago I was already at Genius trying to get to Queen Bee. I think I saw, but didn't try, "ladyland". Turns out the word I was missing was the rather more pedestrian "landlady." Reader, I kicked myself.

electric landlady

lodger? i ardly even knew er

Yesterday's omissions included DETUNE and DETUNED which I thought was weird

They also omitted UNCEDED and I thought they might do something good and include it next time so I wrote them asking them to do so

yeah not accepting UNCEDED is pretty ridiculous
DETUNE/DETUNED also (esp considering UNTUNED was accepted) but it’s one of those commonly used but not formally defined tech terms maybe

xp i was pretty disappointed getting QB was just the same screen you get for genius, was hoping for fireworks or something

also missing yesterday were unindicted and untended

Yesterday had FALAFEL and FLAUTA but not TEFF or FUFU, which are staple foods in Africa.

But how many US citizens know what a falafel is versus what injera is? I mean, I get your point, but they sell glorified flautas at 7-11.

teff was a v weird omission imo

For some perverse reason I thought "tuff" would work.

So. There are areas where Sam is decently conversant and others where he isn't. Birds yes, geology no. Foods kinda. Graphic design and book production no, but jocular loanwords (caca, nada, primo) yes.

chica but no mami iirc

Right, and mama but not dada.

Instead of getting incensed I find it kind of fascinating. As noted above, I am 1000% certain that my own vocabulary is full of blind spots and inconsistencies. But then, I don't have my idiosyncratic judg(e)ments paraded in front of the sentient world by the New York Fucking Times. Which is as it should be.

Would it be better or worse to have a committee, something like Merriam-Webster's usage panel? Possibly worse. As we've found, committees have blind spots too. Would it be better or worse to still have one person, but instead it's a different person? Like, say, Bryan Garner or James McBride or Gretchen McCullough. Or, for that matter, Will "Eat My" Shortz.

For everyone who found Garner too prescriptive you'd have someone who found McCullough too lenient.

So I keep coming back to: might as well be Sam (for all my gripes)

one person, but instead it's a different person

^ this

food is where the arbitrariness of including some obscure words but not others is most obvious imo

getting really good at italian and indian food names though!

Hes a disaster imo, its the inclusion of absolutely obscure specialist jargon as and when suits him and the omission of perfectly valid but rare words besides

I hate him

Then go do a different free fun thing maybe?

Just a thpught

*thought

no we're through the looking glass, ymp, locked in an embrace of hate, entwined in a spiral down that last endless staircase

Ok

Enjoy

Meanwhile I feel like there a whole lot of other entertainment options on offer and you could just, y'know, go do those things

Or not

Whatevs