Wordle

The Wordle craze finally reached me. I’m not a fan of word games because this is my second language and I always feel disadvantaged and a bit stupid. But this was different. 5-letter words, even I know a lot of them. Now that I’ve played 20 times, I haven’t come across a word yet I didn’t know. It seems to help to have a limited vocabulary. Stephen keeps on coming up with guesses of words that are unfamiliar to me, at least ones that are not in my everyday vocabulary.

Every night before going to sleep, I try thinking of the word I will start with the next day. It’s meditative. Once I have the word, I try to imprint on it by repeating it in my head or finding an “Eselsbrücke” (donkey’s bridge or mnemonic) to remember it the next morning, not always easy at my age. So far, so good.

I also like reading lately before going to sleep. Reading until the wee hours. Actually by the time I stop, the hours are not so wee anymore. The other morning it was after 6 am.

What happens now is like a curse. I read and start seeing all these 5-letter words I never thought about. I want to remember them as starting words, but there is no way I can remember them all. So in the middle of night I start sending myself emails with 5-letter words.

Here are some of them: flies, files, shape, crowd, train, faces, woman, women, tower, guard, human, shaky, bones, tears, musty, voice, death, among, heard, decay, agony, least, steal, sound, guilt, guild, touch, close, alive, lined, erase, water, quiet, quite, waste, about….

Then I have to stop reading, because all I’m doing is trying to find the next best word to use in the morning. I have no idea what I’m reading anymore. Any book recommendation without 5-letter words is welcome.

And if you haven’t played yet, give it a try. One word a day, the same word for anyone playing. We’re all in this together.

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk

A heads up, though. The New York Times has bought the game. Congratulations to the creator, he deserves the 10 million. But why does everything in our society have to end in money? I’m sure the New York Times is not paying such an amount to do something good in the world. They will want their profit. And even if they only ask $1 a month, with millions of us playing this game, there would be a huge profit. I wish the creator would have asked us for a dollar or two donation. He could have made the same amount without commercializing Wordle.

Amadou Diallo

It was this incident that made me aware what it means to be black in this country and run into the police. Actually more the police running after you.

Of course I knew all the stories about Black Panthers in the ’60s and ’70s and how police raided their homes and started shooting indiscriminately and killed so many. I even had a book with all the news stories about this.

But time had gone by and I’m not black and I didn’t live in this country for a long time. By the time I came back, it was with 2 kids trying to survive in a country where everything had tripled in expenses. Shock.

But then Amadou Diallo got shot. 41 bullets! It was February 4, 1999. And it didn’t stop there. Since then there has been a parade of police officers and racists targeting and killing Black people.

I have no answers except for all of us to stand up for this injustice whenever there is a chance. Support Black Lives Matter.

Here is the song that I played over and over again yesterday.