During this time the New York Times published a story on its Spelling Bee puzzle. The Bee was a feature of the paper edition that followed the crossword to the digital edition, with spectacular results. It’s enormously popular. I learned what I should have assumed: that there are numerous social media sites in which a given day’s puzzle is discussed, clues given, complaints made.
The puzzles are created when seven letters are selected, including the one required to be in every word, and all possible words are generated by a computer. It is the job of the puzzle editor to select the words that the puzzle will accept. The idea is to include familiar words, including slang, plus a few more esoteric or technical words. Though the article didn’t admit it, the selection includes a hefty number of words that go unused except in word puzzles, from crosswords to Scrabble.
I learned from the article that there is a level higher than Genius, called Queen Bee, which requires getting all of the words for that puzzle (which may be fewer than 20 or more than 60.) This neither bothers nor tempts me because I disdain those questionable Scrabble words, and try to avoid them even when I remember one. Getting to Genius without them is my game within the game.
The article’s description of how the puzzles are made leaves a few things out. As any long-time player knows, there are words that recur in these puzzles that become almost signatures of the Spelling Bee (for instance roto, toro.) While the adventure is seeing which new words a given puzzle evokes, there is the inevitable process of keying in words from this remembered list of Spelling Bee words.
It’s also true that if one puzzle rejects a word (with the neutral message “not in word list”), all Spelling Bee puzzles will. I thought I’d made my peace with my own list of perfectly good words it won’t accept, until a recent puzzle didn’t recognize “immanent.” That’s disturbing.
And then there is the matter of the absence of one letter of the alphabet: S. No puzzle ever has S. I guessed the obvious rationale would be that many more words could be made simply by adding S at the end. That in fact may be why, but in the past few months I’ve noted the frequency of puzzles that include e and d among the letters, or i, n, and g. Both combinations create many new words from words already made.
But because of the four-letter rule (words must have a minimum of four letters), these suffixes often make words that otherwise wouldn’t qualify. What interests me is how many times it has taken me a long time to see the “ed” or “ing” possibility in a given seven letters.
One of the attractions of the games—which is also its greatest drawback—is that I never know how long one is going to take me to reach my Genius goal. It might take 15 minutes. But it can also throttle me for three hours, I am loathe to admit. Usually a big chunk of those hours is finding just a few words, or even just one. Since this has become a nightly ritual (almost always, right after midnight, when the new puzzle drops on the West Coast), a major change in duration can affect everything afterwards, including bedtimes.
And yes, it has occurred to me that doing the puzzle every day is more than a habit and suggests addiction, and that continuing it until I reach those levels suggests compulsion as well as a game. I’ve thought about quitting, especially after I reached a year straight.
And maybe I will, or maybe I’ll slack off now and then. But the basic pleasure of it recurs, which is the fun of making words. (The puzzle mostly doesn’t take proper names, but I like to make them anyway.) Words come to me that I haven’t heard or read in years, including a fair percentage that I couldn’t define. I could use most of them in a sentence, even if I didn’t know what I’d just said. (The truth is that in my writing, even when I use the precise right word I can’t necessarily define it. It means exactly what it means, right down to the sound.)
Now I want to work on the compulsion to finish in one sitting, when I know (as others also know) that returning to the puzzle after leaving it for awhile often results in seeing words that had eluded me. But the discipline to put it down is something I need to work on.
I am also sure doing the Bee relates to my writing, and even this blog. When I write and publish something here, I mostly have no idea of who reads it or what effect it has. The Spelling Bee has less possibility but more certainty. In my ongoing writing projects, or even discrete pieces, there is always the question of when is it really finished (and why.) The Spelling Bee has a minimum definition of finished—and a 24 hour life.
I also wonder whether I would have been so faithful for this long if there wasn’t a pandemic outside keeping me in, or if trying to absorb the ongoing shock and bewilderment of the news didn’t suggest a daily respite in a closed world of letters, and words yet to be formed. But here I am, and here I will be for months to come. Maybe this helps my writing projects or maybe it hurts them by distracting me. But I know my main job right now is to not get sick. If this helps, why not?
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