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

damn today’s is hard!

I just hit genius with dumdum which I protest is not an actual word.

I have never heard of colcannon, from yesterday

jaq, it's a type of bullet, named after a place in India

Ah, thanks koogs - I only knew it as a brand of lollipop.

lol I would never have expected the Bee to know COLCANNON tbh.

I didn't know that one nor CODON, which somebody told me was in another Bee very recently.

Colcannon (the cabbage dish) seems on the obscure side to me, especially if mildly specialized terms like conn, nacelle, tuff, and teff are not on the word list. Plus, not allowing mild Briticisms like toff but requiring knowledge of Irish cuisine, Indian breads, rare birds and plants, etc.

The selectivity is understandable but it is mos def arbitrary and idiosyncratic

i wonder if today’s bee is sam’s subtle “fuck you” to russia
as every letter exists in the russian alphabet except I - which makes it the ukrainian alphabet

Should be accepted: PION

got close to QB today for the first time. missed NOHOW, which I only guessed after seeing the clue Sam, there is NOWAY this is a word (5)

Which clue source do you go to?

the comments section at the NYT "Today's Hints" link

yesterday I couldn't get PICOT even after seeing multiple comments/clues referring to it as a loop stitch in crocheting

Oh, thanks. I only ever looked at the top with the stats, which is a tiny bit helpful but not that much. A friend of mine likes to use some other guy's hints, Kevin something. Davis, Kevin Davis.

Okay, the set of hints by Sarah of Norway were really good, thanks. Done for today.

ONe word kept me from QB today (GI7), and it turned out I didnt know it (but a well worded clue in the NTY chat helped.

NYT rather. I am so tired.

Had exactly that experience although couldn't find the chat when I was doing it so ending up finding that word myself.

I also got the Wordle in 2 tries, so I'm chuffed.
Now I just have to try and beat S- on the mini crossword leaderboard, he keeps kicking my arse.

3/3's had the most bullshit words since I started playing

NAMETAPE ??

PENMAN is some bullshit too. not a word

Yup

it just feels gratuitous, tipping the scales, like he wants to make sure QB remains rare

PENMANship is a word, so why not PENMAN?

use it in a sentence

The penman is mightier than the swordsman

Ian Penman -- What's he up to?

if PENMAN is accepted i demand PACMAN and ANTMAN should be as well

Ha, exactly. I tried all those, didn’t even bother with the other one although I thought about it.

he had good penmanship, he was a good penman.

penman
pĕn′mən
noun

An expert in penmanship. <- this
A copyist; a scribe. <- also this
An author; a writer. <- all of these in fact

Makes sense, but how common is it really? Any citations from the corpus? A corpus?

Honestly I'm on Amazing today and that's the highest rank I've reached in a while--some have been too chewy for me, and other days I haven't had time!

I'm amazed by the speed round ppl but I need to, like, come back to the Bee a few times over the course of the day.

OTM

so i assumed that sam never updates the accepted word list but yesterday by pure chance i discovered that's not the case. you know how nytbee.com tells when same letters were used previously? i check it occasionally because it's interesting to see how changing the centre letter affects the number of words. so i was looking at it yesterday and the previous time the same letters were used it was also the same centre letter L (which also disproves my assumption that it's never repeated).

guess what! it had one less answer. and the answer was PULI

mar 4 2022: https://nytbee.com/Bee_20220304.html
jun 19 2020: https://nytbee.com/Bee_20200619.html

There's an anecdote about how RAFFIA wasn't accepted until someone physically mailed a bunch to a very confused Will Shortz, after which Sam relented for some reason.

The opposite has happened too, where the game no longer accepts words that it once did in the past (e.g. ILIAD).

Forgot my source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/crosswords/spellingbee-puzzles.html

haven’t seen that, that answers some questions, thank you!

Two words today that I couldn't really get even with hints

Lots of fun words in this short one

I have the exact opposite feeling! Frustrated at missing just W-7 and JO-6 and have utterly no idea what either could be.

Those were the same two I couldn't get even with hints. Went to one of the popular solvers to ease my mind and get it over with.

got JO-6 by some miracle and JA-7, but didn't even think about the WA-7 slang word

I only knew jo-6 cause I live in AZ

Ohhhhhhh that was enough to job my memory! I've heard of it in the context of facial cleansers. Last one is sure to elude me however.

Did you see Dan's hidden text about it? it's a compound slang word and a hit song

This is interesting because I solved all of today by myself (even the oddities mentioned) but really struggled with Thursday's oddities, which I think were gavotte, gallette, geotag