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

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…

i disagree that anyone else’s would be as arbitrary but i know what you mean. in any case you do kind of get a feeling for the personality of any editor. ezersky’s does not beguile me. for instance, this is a guy who says WOOT

it’s the other way around and that’s pretty standard now i think?

Okay but what is this then?

https://toppng.com/public/uploads/preview/parental-advisory-png-white-115522471060relexpojy.png

dead media

it’s a shape

compact discs i.e. redbook CD format media, are not a computer storage medium.

just go with the shifting plurals in that sentence alright

I had a dreamed about the SB last night, and what's more, S was one of the letters.

today's pangram seemed esoteric to me, I would never have gotten gunport

I like having tried to solve the low word count puzzles of the last few days though

TFW when you're at 43/170 but have accepted that you're not going to get the last 4-letter word.

I haven't encountered a puzzle with that many words yet, I try hardest to get every 4-letter word, it seems just

I stop at Genius and feel like a loser when two or three of my friends get to Queen Bee

Like, how tf

Irrationally upset that fronton isn't accepted today. The cultural fading of jai alai continues apace.

got the pangram today easily as with most of the puzzles, but with so many words it was hard to get them all - rotini, croci and tortoni (my nemesis, that horrible dessert) were all beyond me - but it burns me that I got friction, the pangram, but not fiction

tricot and tricorn came to me for some reason when I was thinking about tri- words, but I just made a guess with triton

not accepting PENTANGLE (a pangram!) is a halloween season outrage

As a fan of the band, I too was disappointed!

haha! that would-be pangram was one of the first words that jumped out at me

I got one of today's pangrams easily, but not the other, I couldn't think of any words that started with egg

Got genius today thanks to the thread title

I missed that one!

there seem to be a lot of bird-related words, today also pipit

I'm about done with the Italian foods. Tortoni, rotini, (both used recently) focaccia a couple days ago.

Meanwhile no prion, no introit

:) 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!