Considering the date, I feel like I should make some sort of stoner joke, but instead I'm going to talk about Wordle.  Yes, I managed to get caught up in this trendy game that swept the globe earlier this year.  Everyone was talking about it so I thought I'd check it out and discovered it was pretty fun and not too time consuming considering you can only guess one word per day.  And as a writer I suppose I generally like games involving words.  Although I'm not the biggest Scrabble fan in the world to be honest.  It's all right, but not my favorite.

So anyway I lost the very first Wordle I ever played because I didn't read the instructions thoroughly and I didn't understand what was going on with the different colored letters.  On day two I made sure to read the instructions and from there I went on a 94 day win streak which came to an end yesterday.  I got undone by the word foyer.  It's not totally surprising that I would lose with a word like that.  It's not a regular part of my vocabulary.  I'm not saying it's not a totally legit word.  It is.  I just don't use it hardly ever so it's not at the top of my mind.  I can't remember the last time I ever spoke it in a sentence.  I know a little while back I heard a lot of people were complaining because the word of the day was caulk, but I got that one in like three guesses and I don't use it much in my daily conversations either.  Caulk is a legit word and so is foyer.

Just for fun I'm going to analyze my Wordle downfall.  I don't have a particular strategy for guessing my first word other than using something that has five different letters so I can cover as much ground as possible.  I have yet to make a correct guess on my first attempt, although I came really close one time when I guessed hoist and the word was moist.  I managed to get that one on my second guess, which is a feat I've pulled of three times according to the handy statistic graph they provide you.  My most common by far is four guesses, which I've done  forty-two times.  It makes sense that would be the most common since my guess distribution is almost a perfect bell curve and four sits right in the middle. 

So anyway for no reason in particular I went with rails for my first guess.  All that yielded my was that there was an R but I had it in the wrong position.  This isn't a terrible outcome because sometimes eliminating a lot of letters is just as valuable as knowing what's there.  For my next guess I wanted a word that had an R in a different spot but was otherwise all different letters.  I ended up going with grope.  R was still in the wrong spot, but I learned O and E were also in the word, but also in the wrong spots. 

I always try to make my next guess something that fits all the criteria that I know, meaning I wanted to guess a word that has an O, an R, and an E in different spots than the two words I've guessed so far.  Sometimes it's really hard to think of a word that fits that criteria.  I suppose it's a legitimate strategy to guess a word with letters you know aren't in it or that you know are in the wrong position, just to get some more information on what other letters are or aren't in it, but I generally don't go that route.  I'm trying to get a winning guess every time, damn it.  Based on this, my third guess was bored.  With this I now had O and E in the correct position and by process of elimination based on my other guesses I knew R had to be at the end.  So by guess number three I knew where three of the five letters were supposed to be.  This is usually a good formula for getting a correct guess within one or two more guesses, but that was not to be my fate this time.  

I went with toner and all I learned was that T an N were eliminated.  Next I tried hover and only got H and V eliminated for my trouble.  Now I was on my final guess, but with a lot of letters eliminated and three letters in the correct position I felt pretty confident I had it in the bag when I went with cower for my last guess.  And then I lost for the first time in over 3 months.  

I'm not sure what it would have taken to get me to foyer.  Maybe if toner had been my first guess instead of my fourth I would have found my way there, but I guess I'll never know.  Time to get started on a new streak I suppose.