I’m not someone who generally follows trends, but as a self-declared wordsmith, I’m delighted that the popularity of Wordle has gone viral. In this game, you have six chances to guess the daily five-letter word, while the computer prompts you if a letter you’ve guessed is in the word or not and whether it’s in the correct position.
The game has divided people into devotees who avidly play it every day and those who hate it and recoil from an attempt. People have become so invested, that protests have been mounted over issues, such as the use of American spelling and the validity of certain words. In response to grievances over the recently used word, ‘caulk’, The New York Times, who run the site, removed all potentially obscure words from the system.
I love Wordle, of course, as it’s fun and immensely satisfying when I finally snag the solution – usually on the fourth or fifth try, but occasionally on the very last go, sighing with relief at rising once again to surmount the linguistic challenge.
And in fact, we make decisions in the manner of Wordle on a daily basis. We often know when things aren’t working, but not always the particulars of how or what to change. We feel sure we’re right and get frustrated when a situation continues to elude us, whereas, we may, in fact, be very close to a solution, which might be achieved by moving around one or two things, or plumping for an option we hadn’t previously considered. Some scenarios can be clearly worked out, some are just luck and some matters take a bit longer to settle.
However we arrive at a solution, we have to continue to try. If nothing else, the satisfaction and peace of mind at solving a problem strengthens our resilience in our ability to do so in future. And perhaps it can even bring us the one word that we’re all striving for – joy, or maybe even b-l-i-s-s.