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

Two of words I didn't get (I looked already) were SUCH obvious crossword puzzle answers, I forgot both of them pop up ALL the time but no one has literally ever used them in a sentence ime.

pangram today was bullshit imho

My preferred site is https://www.shunn.net/bee/latest.

― Carte Blanchett (Leee), Tuesday, September 14, 2021 1:25 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

too many ads. also a bit too much info

I got the Pangram today and can't remember what it was lol

Agreed, kind of a lackluster set of letters today, even though I'm with a word two of the pangram.

it was the first word I thought of in this puzzle for the first time

I usually start with 4-letter words beginning with the first word in the alphabet. Today most of the words had only 4 letters.

The 5-letters were hard

the 6-letter words also

three of the 5-letter words (starting with kn-) and separately the two 6-letter words were related to each other in spelling

the pangram was a compound word, for the 2nd or 3rd time since I've been doing this puzzle

I missed knoll, which kept me from QB, and as a Cocteaus fan, that kind of stung.

Ooh today's is much meatier.

finding today quite difficult tbh.

I'M SUPPOSED TO FIND 49 WORDS IN THIS MESS HOW???

Im at 46 but its been a hard slog

Second pangram and at 47 i really am tapped out

at least so far there are no crazy words like dugong

I at least got that one. Came home today from a long day of errands without enough time to focus. Think I got like 27 or so before I had to go do other stuff. I look forward to feeling stupid tomorrow.

I've only had experience with this recently but today's was the most brutal

haven't encountered one of these yet that has had only 4 four-letter words. that's what I usually go for first, expecting to get a lot of them

i got really into the two no touch puzzles and recommend them
https://krazydad.com/play/starbattle/

Ooohh I just jammed through a few of those and it’s fun! Thanks, forks!

yer welcome! i find them obsessive and challenging to specific parts of my brain that aren't especially elastic.

(for non-subscribers, NYT runs two of those every day in the print edition)

Whoops I got to #7 and I have the first occurrence of not being able to deduce the next star and having to make a strategic guess. Hmm. I think.

with the harder ones, you have to actually game out some six or seven moves ahead when you get a 50/50. it's difficult to do in ink!

Does that no-touch game indicate if you've successfully solved a particular puzzle?

it does

or rather the electronic version does

The krazydad thing is amazing and now I can’t sleep

I just broke into Book 2. :|

still don't think I understand it

I didn't either (hence my confusion on why I hadn't solved a puzzle) but it's a little like sudoku in that every row and column and region has to have exactly X stars, with the added difficulty of stars not being adjacent to each other.

i can attest that over time you will start to get better at the two no touch but I fuck up every third one in a way that requires me to start over from scratch.

I should mention that there's an app: Star Battle Go. $9 gets you 3000 puzzles, basically set for life. I'm recommending it.

app also has tutorials which i have yet to try.

loved today’s spelling bee with only one point five vowels

I liked the one from today too

yesterday’s was interesting, there were not that many words and there were a lot of words that were hard to think of - curium, tritium, tatami, cacti, circuit, tutti

today’s was also hard and with not that many words, but I was able to think of more

surprised it didn't accept WHINGE

I was surprised by that too

Whinge is British

but seems universal

i get not having british words like COLOUR where there's a one-to-one american equivalent but it's not like whinge is the british spelling of whine, cause brits also have whine. it's just a different word. and americans occasionally use it. e.g. here's a maureen o'dowd column from 2014 where she uses it https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/opinion/dowd-is-barry-whiffing.html

I may have played too much star battle in the past 48 hours

what hath I wrought

same!! totally addictive

The whole hand-curated thing just opens Sam up to so much griping.

star battle is a problem, yes. did you guys get the app?

today I couldn’t think of ambit, beige, baggie, biggie or gimme. those last few remind me to try colIoquial words. I got iamb, but iambi seems exceptionally esoteric

well that’s the thing with this puzzle. usually you’ll get a sense of the editor’s boundaries, but with this it too often feels random. some dog breeds but not a labrador? etc

It's a miniature of every prescriptive / descriptive lexicographical / usage dispute ever. Why this and not that?

But focused on one individual and his particular idiosyncratic segment of the elephant.

If you or I were to curate the Bee, there would be just as many "Why this and not that?" gripes. Just different ones.

Many years ago I was a magazine copyeditor and in a moment of rashness I decided that "disk" was a shape and "disc" was a computer storage medium. Or maybe it was the other way around. I forget. But it's probably still out there in a disused style guide somewhere. My secret shame.

it’s the other way around and that’s pretty standard now i think? from tiny acorns…