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Wordle Postgame Report, October 4

GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE DEP'T.

Tom Scocca

Oct 5, 2022 — 2 min read

Design for an Embroidered or Woven Horizontal Border of the 'Fabrique de St. Ruf,’ Fabrique de Saint Ruf, Lyon, France, Brush and white gouache on glazed tracing paper, The design is an enriched variation of -87 showing besides leaves and blossoms branching off, a big lacy blossom covering the BOUGH. At the bottom are a row of boughs with three leaves and a flower each and a row of leaf scrolls. Somewhat more than one repeat is shown., France, 1805–1815, Drawing, Drawing. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

October 4, BOUGH, 3/6

The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of a game of Wordle, the five-letter-word guessing game now owned by the New York Times. If you do not play Wordle, Indignity encourages you to please skip this item. The existence of the Wordle Postgame Report does not constitute an endorsement of playing Wordle, not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.

I HAD JUST eaten a bowl of rice, my first food in some 40 hours, but I had not brewed my tea yet, and the colonoscopy sedation didn't seem to be quite out of my system. Under these conditions, it didn't feel wise to spend the good starter word I'd previously written down, back on a day when I was fed and alert. In the bathroom mirror I was surprised to notice that I still had electrodes stuck to my...CHEST. Five letters. I peeled the electrodes off into the wastebasket and went and played the word. Yellow H. Even laboring down in first gear, my brain realized that the H couldn't be in an SH. Or, of course, in a CH. Oh and. Not TH, either, right. So probably a GH then. ROUGH. Correct description of my frame of mind, only four-fifths correct for Wordle. Something-OUGH. Not TOUGH, that T was darkened out at the bottom. I'd used it. What letters were left? BOUGH. My relaxed and supple consciousness had none of its usual trouble switching among different pronunciations of the same sets of letters. Why, it could also be DOUGH! But—well. OK. So, right. The thing is. Normally I would have been one of the first people posting in the Wordle group text, before the West Coast got going. Today I was hindmost. And on the train back from the procedure, I had seen just enough of a very nonspecific message, in a notification on my phone, to absorb the sense that people were not happy with today's word. My clear-headed, caffeine-sharpened, early-morning self would have done a rigorous quarantine, working out how I would have played the game without that information, or quasi-information, and holding myself to it. Right now, though? I'd thought of BOUGH first. DOUGH was surely a better word. I had reason to believe the better word wouldn't win, and I was too tired to deactivate that belief. BOUGH. All green. Finished it in three, but I was out on a limb, ethically. Call it four.

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