![]() This story is part of the March 2023 issue of Hour Detroit. “I don’t try to maintain streaks on anything. “I would say 90 percent of the complaints are about broken streaks,” Bennett says. The biggest source of Wordle complaints is something that doesn’t particularly speak to Bennett personally. “If I work far enough ahead, I can, because I have no memory for what I set up two months ago, or it’s dim enough that I at least have to get three guesses before I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, that must be it,’” Bennett says.Ĭurrently, Bennett’s go-to first Wordle guess is “trace.” Of the Times’ suite of games, Spelling Bee is probably her favorite (“I don’t know if I should say this, but I like it a little more than Wordle to play,” Bennett says sheepishly), and she still constructs crosswords for the feminist magazine Bust, as well as for Crosswords with Friends and Groundcover News. … So that was one case where … some people complained, and then I said, ‘I need to research every word, even if I think I know what it means.’”Ĭan she still play Wordle and enjoy the game she curates? ![]() It was an old epithet toward Hungarians that I didn’t recognize. “I care if a word is derogatory in a tertiary meaning, and if somebody … has heard that word hurled at them, then I know I don’t want to use that, even if it affects 2 percent of solvers,” Bennett says. ![]() But she’s also opting out of obscure terms that most people would never guess (like “caput,” a Latin term for “head”) and invests time plumbing each word’s usage history. It was just on a big platform.”Įven so, Bennett’s generally aiming for randomness instead of themes these days in regard to Wordle’s solutions. But the reality was, it was another grouse. “I mean, there was a Slate hit piece about it, where the title was ‘The New Editor Is Ruining Wordle.’ … If I was reading this and I was 25, I would have just been devastated. “I just look at what’s being said and gut-check whether it’s valid,” Bennett says. There was blowback, in part because these word choices seemed to emphasize American holiday traditions when the game’s scope is global. But this was the moment when the thick skin Bennett developed while working in management for 25 years (as an editor at Mathematical Reviews) kicked in. I haven’t added any words yet.” Bennett - who grew up in Maine and originally came to Ann Arbor to study English literature at the University of Michigan (’89) - also dabbled briefly in Wordle themes, setting up “drive” the day before Thanksgiving and “feast” on the holiday itself. … So the first thing I did was scramble the list. I don’t know what the joy would be in it, but you could get it on the first try every time if you’d downloaded that. “Some people had published how to download list in order,” Bennett says. So what is there to do? Bennett has been trying a few different approaches. Josh Wardle, the game’s creator, has already programmed 2,700 words into the game, so Wordle is potentially stocked until 2027. In 2020, when the Times put out a call for an associate games editor, Bennett applied and landed her dream gig. After winning a local crossword puzzle contest in 2010 and attending a national crossword players’ conference, she ventured into crossword construction, eventually getting her work published in the Times. This kind of media attention seemed to blow up as quickly as Wordle’s popularity did in 2021.īennett grew up loving jigsaw puzzles and word games.
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