Cold Comfort
Sunday January 23, 2022
It’s been cold. Unconscionably cold. It hits me like a personal affront as I step out of the house for my half mile commute to the office. Why this? Why now? Why me? My face hurts.
I gratefully accept my wife’s offer of a lift, perched for two minutes on an electrically heated seat, clouds of breath frosting the inside of the windshield. Burn some fossil fuel. Contribute to global warming. We need it.
I’m told by my son that there is no such thing as cold. Cold is the natural state of the universe; heat is the exception. Everything is tending toward a state of lesser energy and higher entropy, settling and dispersing and dissipating until absolute zero is reached, atoms collapse, and the Washington memorial reduces to the size of a pencil eraser.
Our perception of cold is simply the loss or transfer of energy. A bitter reminder of the ultimate futility of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The cold has driven my friend Steve and I indoors from our ritual weekly meeting spot on the front porch. Each Saturday afternoon for almost a year we have rocked and ruminated, pondering politics, monitoring meteorology and just generally taking a break from the daily grind.
It turns out that one of Steve’s nephews, Josh Wardle, works for Instagram and develops online word games on the side. A few weeks ago, Steve was introduced to Josh’s latest creation: Wordle. His wife immediately became an addict although Steve remains mystified.
Over the next weeks, I start noticing references to Wordle cropping up in my news feeds. Whether this is because Google tailors my feed according to my search history, or whether Wordle is breaking into the mainstream consciousness it’s hard to say.
I myself drift into a regular habit of solving the day’s Wordle before breakfast. My wife and I exchange texts containing little grids of green and yellow tiles accompanied by appropriate emojis.
It occurs to me to research the relative frequency at which various letters occur in the English language in order to improve my initial guess. My search turns up not only the standard statistics, but also a refined analysis that considers only five letter words. Other hard-core Wordlers are out there ahead of me and suddenly the internet appears to be awash with guessing strategies, snarky commentary, memes, tweets, and cartoons.
Over coffee with a group of colleagues, the talk ranges over the prospect of inflation, recommendable books, and, inevitably, Wordle. Every single person at the table is a daily Wordler except Norman the CFO, who has not even heard of it. Norman, you live in a cave!
The more I play, and the more I consider it, the more I realize that Wordle is not really about math. It’s true that frequently occurring letters occur frequently, and that having a number of yellow tiles to rearrange can seem closer to a solution than a depressing row of gray.
But every guess in Wordle has to be a valid five-letter word. Not only that, but Josh has preselected 12,000 common words that are acceptable as guesses — other words will result in a ‘not in wordlist’ response. The list of actual solutions is apparently even shorter, even more common.
The other day I arrived at row 4 having established the first three letters: PRI. Previous guesses had ruled out the remaining vowels and a few common consonants.
Three words leapt to mind: PRINT, PRIMP, PRICK.
What to do.
PRINT seems more common to me, but that may simply be cognitive bias. According to Daniel Kahneman, the availability of examples that can be readily brought to mind increases the perception of probability. I bet any number of digital natives who grew up on Instagram and TikTok would plunk for PRIMP as obviously more common. In these dark times, PRICK as a verb is probably uttered a zillion times by weary health care workers in vaccination centers, but for me the word still carries a slight taint from its use as a pejorative noun in my high school days in the 80s.
Well, nothing ventured nothing gained. PRINT. Nope. PRIMP. Nope. PRICK. Whew!
Because Wordle is played in a browser, I presume each guess is posted to a web server somewhere. It’s possible that a vast database of guesses is being compiled in real time. Statistical analysis of millions of guesses would reveal our collective cognitive biases, cultural blind spots, lack of imagination. I imagine Josh Wardle as a benign omniscient presence. He alone knows the answer of the day. Why is it so hard? Collectively, did we arrive at DRINK before FAVOR? What does this say about us? WINCE.
It may interest you to know that I have devised a guaranteed way of winning Wordle. All it takes is a few willing accomplices. Here’s what you do: gather for your daily ritual wordling session in a venue of your choice. The first person enters your collective guesses. If you have not hit on the solution by row 5, start entering guesses in the second person’s session, and so on.
If you have enough friends, you will eventually stumble on the solution. All it takes is to move from a frame of competition to one of collaboration. Share what you know is right, what you know is wrong, what you don’t know.
Maybe Wordle is a metaphor for life. We are all trying to guess the answer, but we don’t even know how many letters are in the word. Is it simple, or hard? Or is it simple, yet uncommon, rendered difficult by the availability bias.
Each generation collects a few yellow and green squares, but is it even the same answer for the next generation? Or are they trying to guess a different word?
I’m reaching the point where I’m starting to think I don’t have enough guesses left to get it right in this life. According to what I have read, and in my own experience there are three things which abide: Faith, Hope and Love.
I believe one of these is a green tile.
