Fab vocab

Words are hard, man. Difficult even. Tough too, I suppose. Arduous, onerous, and uhh...hard.

I recently gained access to the New York Times online, meaning I can now do their crossword every day. This has been quite satisfying as a brain exercise during my morning coffee, but I've also strayed into some of the other featured puzzles (the ones that don't involve hating the 75% of their op-ed columnists who are morons, a challenge they literally put on the front page daily, but I digress). Behold:

There's Sudoku if you want to pretend it's 2012 and solve something on your brand-new iPad. Also on offer are a couple of visual-matching-type games that I don't understand because I've never particularly tried to. Letter Boxed is vaguely entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying because there are multiple solutions to every problem, which leaves you forever wondering if there wasn't a better way than the one you found. Spelling Bee, however, suffers from none of this. Find as many words with at least four letters that include the center letter as you can, and the game will increasingly compliment you as you amass a list of qualifying words.

I believe the sequence of adulation shown at the top of the word list goes: Beginner > Good Start > Moving Up > Good > Solid > Great > Nice > Amazing > Genius > Queen Bee.

It's lovely for a game to tell you you're smart! I swear I achieved the Genius level once but it hadn't occurred to me at the time that I was going to write this, so I have no screenshot proof of the occasion. Nevertheless, I'll posit this achievement not only proves I'm intelligent but it also makes me at least as clued in as Steve Martin:

(I'm probably funnier too)

(*ducks*)

How the hell anyone can achieve the Queen Bee platform is beyond me though. That's the level where you've found every word that's recognized by whatever OED algorithm is behind the puzzle and there's nothing left to solve, an achievement on par with reading the entire bible in Latin aloud as far as I'm concerned. People who can do that are the same reason I've never had the confidence to enter a Scrabble tournament.

Yes, I can see I missed "codec" and "moldy" in the screenshot above, which is why I'm rarely a Genius and will never be the Queen Bee. But the challenge is still fun, because it's...hard. Laborious maybe. Operose?

It keeps me busy at least.