Guess again

 Time for a shocking admission and a timely one -- rarely do I focus on current trends or fashion, knowing that the post will turn stale when the world's attention shifts after 15 minutes, but in this case I shall make an exception:

I do not play "wordle" and I do not want to play wordle.

Wordle is (so I gather) an online word game in which the player must guess a 5 letter word after being given hints as to the accuracy of previous guesses (letters correct, location correct...). People ask me if I play and expect that I, as an English teacher, must play religiously and encourage all others to do the same. I do neither.

I never enjoyed Word Master Mind as a child. In that game, one has to guess the word chosen by a competitor by deducing it based on the scoring of previous guesses (letters correct, location correct...). I liked regular MasterMind more though I wasn't a huge fan of that either.

So people want to know why I don't want to play and I'll answer with a quote from Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice, II, i)

If Hercules and Lichas play at dice
Which is the better man, the greater throw
May turn by fortune from the weaker hand:
So is Alcides beaten by his page;
And so may I, blind fortune leading me,
Miss that which one unworthier may attain,
And die with grieving.

The whole game is based on a lucky first guess and then limited by the particular vocabulary and tendency of the player and game creator. Brilliant people can fail to get the right word because they know too many viable options while others can fail to get it because they know too few. A genius who guesses an inapt first word falls behind a fool who stumbles across a better one, and one cannot look at stats from a series of days to see if an average develops because the pool of words and the potential biases make such a statistic invalid (even more than most statistics are invalid, and that's saying something).

So if I want to feel good or bad about myself, I'll stick to tried and true methods, like what I eat and whether my socks match (or to quote the Bard again, "there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come").