Cheating At Wordle

* Spoiler Alert *

If you haven’t done today’s Wordle and you don’t want it to be ruined, please be warned, the answer follows shortly.  Now that the maybe like the half of one person who statically might be affected, today’s answer is:

GRIFT

Which did bring a smile to my face.

I personally do not cheat at Wordle.  And I know two people that do cheat at it.  There cheating methods differs as different people cheat in different manners.  It’s your approach to the cheating and being honest with yourself about it that says a lot about your character.

I do not cheat at Wordle and I’m fairly proud of it.  My win percentage is a solid 98% with about 400 puzzles solved.  My max streak is 55.  My solved in 3 is slightly higher than solved in 5 guesses.  And naturally as solved in 4 is pretty much par that’s the biggest number.  I’ve never solved in 1 without cheating.  My method doesn’t really allow for more than one, like a lot of people I religiously start with the same first word.  But I do have a solid solved in 2 of 14 with absolutely no cheating.

The one cheater is doing the pointless thing of looking at the hint sites before even attempting to solve it on their own.  They aren’t particularly bright but averagish.  Being aware of the psychology of conspiracism and online grifting has influenced my opinion of them and their Wordle cheating.  The lure of that momentary rush of feeling smarter for just a minute is inescapable.  They’re open about looking for hints.  They aren’t particularly bright neither proudly of it or ashamed of it.  Most of tue time their pride is massaged by the format of the hints.  The hints are organized from subtle, to more forceful, to finally just telling you the answer outright.  Their fun is derived from the satisfaction of jump starting by only looking at the first subtle hint and feeling smarter working from there.

The other, is kinda of frustrating.  One thing I got a lot of growing up is siblings and friends trying to play the “outsmart the smart guy” game.  Being genuinely able to use my brain to solve today’s Wordle in 3 is difficult to handle for a lot of people who have been force fed a steady diet of being made to believe they are smarter than they really are.  This one never, ever admits to the cheating.  They do proudly proclaim about solving in two way more often than could be reasonably expected.  You see, like myself they start with their personal favorite first choice.  For arguments case let’s say that this is SLATE, a great starting word with lots of common letters.  If the Wordle solution is FLUTE, yeah you can understand that the solved in 2 is legit.  But several times the answer is something like PROBE, with just a single letter E in the right spot to go on.

I’m gonna have to call bullshit on that.  In this day and age it’s easy to bring up a list of five letter words that end in E.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordfinder/classic/ends/common/5/e/1

And lots of them don’t have any S-L-A-T’s.  BEIGE, BIOME, BOOZE, BROKE.  I’m sure they get a good number correct in three or four guesses, with careful thought and no hints.  I’m also equally sure that when confronted with just a trailing E and nothing else they searched for hints and found out it started with P, had two vowels and no repeat letters they maybe, just maybe stopped short of the word being thrown in their face and still got lucky.

This person is the kind of person that will be a real <sarcasm font> catch </sarcasm font > in a future relationship.  He will be the kind of person that will marry someone for prettiness and then constantly use fakery to dominate the relationship.  The constant one upmanship, the bragging, the need to keep up with the Joneses, the need to get his own way.  The need to become the full blown narcissist he’s been duped into believing that even not getting caught cheating at something as trivial as Wordle is more important than looking dumb for even second.

My response is my lifelong skill and defense mechanism.  I do not talk about Wordle any more.  I have no need to stoke the fires and wait for him to move into “Ivermectin cures Covid” territory.  For now, let him wallow in his seeing the word GRIFT without it even resonating that it’s much more commonly used today as our culture has embraced denying facts and dominating conversation is an admired skill instead of the problematic psychological symptom of something gone wrong that it is.