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

Yesterday I missed DEVEIN, DEVEINED, DIVVIED and VIVACE.

And just now learned the word HEME.

I met Sam at #acpt2022 such a big 🐝 fan I am!!
thanks for doing so much to make it fun this weekend !! pic.twitter.com/aXCkfRAjzX

— jk (@kaplajk) April 3, 2022

Was confused by that lady's neck attire til I realised its just a mask pulled down.

really struggling with getting genius today

yeah todays is quite hard

I usually have a few goes at it throughout the day and yesterday I didn't have time, so I didn't get genius, which was frustrating. So many easy words. Who doesn't know POEM? I don't want Sam thinking I don't know POEM.

Don’t think of that way. Don’t think of it as you don’t know the word. Think of it as it was hard to come up with the word because the puzzle was challenging/confusing/stressful for some reason.

i know poem, i don’t know pome

Group them together from now on, like somebody said upthread about some other words.

I only got pome yesterday because it came up in a previous puzzle and is an anagram of poem

The hardest one for me today (besides trying to put together the compound words) was haulage

Yes, I didn't get that one either until I looked at hints. Also missed HALAL, which makes me kind of sheepish given a certain thread I started.

In fact I just realized I think I typed that word into that thread shortly before looking at the hint that I apparently still needed.

Today I managed to get the pangram but needed hints to get to Genius for the first time in a bit, then couldn't quite get to QB even with hints so looked at https://www.sbsolver.com/ so I could move on.

I hate to bring a Friends meme into this, but pitapat? That's not even a word!

Yes, that one was problematic. I actually tried some variations on that but never hit on the accepted one.

wow, wtf!?

Also, can you really have a singular tapa?

That last one has come up before but yeah

Eagerly awaiting the day I can confidently type in panino unless that day has already come and gone.

I've only been doing the puzzle for a few months, but pitapat has also come up before

Maybe we could have a thread of just words like that not sure. Might not be our style.

I know tapa as a type of cloth. But does Sam know that?!?

Saw that in the dictionary earlier today, never knew about it before myself.

This is the second time that I remember seeing today's PG, and both times I've only gotten it with hints.

So this was changed in midstream to avoid a repeat puzzle, apparently

My words! My beautiful words!

I hear you.

I think today's PG is my favorite.

WHAT!! Noooooooo!!

oh wow, i get to play two today!!

Lol I got QB in the second one, all is forgiven.

Same - I assume DOBRO was excluded as a proper name, but I thought it was pretty genericized at this point.

i was expecting the updated PG to be "SO SORRY THIS HAPPENED EVERYBODY MY BAD SAM"

I hadnt done that arsed up one first time around so I got to Genius on it a few hours after it went up (they go up at 5PM here which is nice timing), now I gotta start all over!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr5Q26E-Esw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FB7bwhj4Qw

TIL:
Peter D. Kramer, The LISTENING TO PROZAC guy, is a big Bee tweeter.
There is some kind of big deal fashionista named Lauren Ezersky.

Interesting that I've counted two words that are accepted today that hadn't been previously. We're changing Sam's mind!

Betting one of those words was QIGONG

Nope!

I find it curious they allow "alternate spellings" for some things, but not when its a matter of US/UK.

Yeah it's a very specific thing where multiple Yiddish variants are cool but Briticisms like boyo, yobbo, bobby, totting, etc. are off-limits. Stuff from Spanish is weirdly hit-or-miss, so you can have loco and toro and nada but not papi.

And then there are the UTTERLY BULLSHIT things like muthaflippin QIGONG or PEWEE or RATATAT gah. I started out in this thread kinda defending Sam - or, rather, saying that any specific person would have an equally arbitrary wordlist, even if they had the best of intentions. But I have completely reversed my position.

I have come to the dark side, I feel the hate flowing within me, and it sings like a whippoorwill among the baobabs.

I’ve tried boyo and bobby, but have never heard of yobbo or totting

accepting the constraints of the puzzle and trying to remember the preferred words you’ve encountered so you can dredge them up again weeks or months later is part of the fun. ratatat has come up so often that I now get it right away

I didn’t come across any alternate spellings today

Dan, fyi yobbo derives from yob, which is boy backwards. A Briticism. Also, if you totted up the bill, what you did is called totting. One of the weirder NO BRITISH ALLOWED things is tory, which was, like, an actual word in colonial America, and it meant someone loyal to the British crown. There are books about it.

Almost nothing from the worlds of sailing, architecture, or geology work.

Meanwhile we need to know like seven different New York Jewish deli pastry types, eighty pasta shapes, and like one hundred weird birds. Because those words all qualify as non-obscure words in American English.

(As long as you live in New York City, watch birds, eat pasta, and have a thorough grounding in Yiddish loanwords.)

Beginning to think that Sam's parents were killed by an English architect/sailor with a passion for amateur geology, and this is how he's getting his extremely specific revenge.

Tory is capitalized on Wikipedia and several online dictionaries, so perhaps it is disqualified as too proper a noun.

Ive tried multiple common fish types in past thatve not passed muster, like TREVALLY and ... other ones I cant recall off top of head.

And "PITAPAT" can just jump in the bin.

Tough one today.

TBH I'm a little put off by the complaining about QIGONG yesterday, but I also realize that I'm saying this from a very biased perspective that I have a hard time detaching myself from, which makes it harder for me to accurately gauge how white people would react to it.