I’ll admit that when it comes to word games, I am an enthusiastic participant and a terribly sore loser. I actually quit playing Wordle last year after some word that I’ve long forgotten ruined my streak. It was my streak, and I loved it! I’d worked so hard on it. Luckily, I had the sweet, warm embrace of my Duolingo streak, so I committed myself to learning another language. (I just hit one year!)
For this puzzle, I started with CRANE, which I believe is the best word to use. Back when I played Wordle more regularly, I loved using the bot to analyze my game, but it also made me feel kind of bad — as if I weren’t logical enough or careful enough in my gameplay. If this sounds like something I should be addressing in therapy, please know that it has come up several times.
CRANE got me a green N (Yay!) and a yellow A (Boo.). When a vowel gets marked as yellow, and it’s an A, that is so frustrating. What if the word had more than one A, like SAUNA? I took a deep breath and focused on the process of elimination, desperately trying not to use letters that had already been grayed out or to accidentally move the N in my rush to solve. So, I went for HAUNT, which put the A in a new position and eliminated H, U, and T. Another yellow A and no new letters unveiled. Ugh.
This is where I got stuck. Either the word begins with an A, or it ends with an A. When I’m down bad like this in Wordle, I start putting X’s in any spaces where I don’t know the letter because it helps me visualize. AXXNX or XXXNA. All that X work inspired me to try AXONS, which according to Encyclopaedia Britannica is a “portion of a nerve cell (neuron) that carries nerve impulses away from the cell body.” Thank you, ninth-grade biology.
Now I had THREE GREEN BOXES! The word definitely began with A and there was an O before the N. Great. Easy peasy. It was definitely AMONG. I’ve never been more sure of anything. For some reason, I started thinking of the mobile game Among Us, which was a very big part of my early pandemic. And as in Among Us, I was stabbed in the back by a word I thought I could trust.
