Tomtit in the tilth -- the NY TIMES SPELLING BEE thread

I know tapa as a type of cloth. But does Sam know that?!?

Saw that in the dictionary earlier today, never knew about it before myself.

This is the second time that I remember seeing today's PG, and both times I've only gotten it with hints.

So this was changed in midstream to avoid a repeat puzzle, apparently

My words! My beautiful words!

I hear you.

I think today's PG is my favorite.

WHAT!! Noooooooo!!

oh wow, i get to play two today!!

Lol I got QB in the second one, all is forgiven.

Same - I assume DOBRO was excluded as a proper name, but I thought it was pretty genericized at this point.

i was expecting the updated PG to be "SO SORRY THIS HAPPENED EVERYBODY MY BAD SAM"

I hadnt done that arsed up one first time around so I got to Genius on it a few hours after it went up (they go up at 5PM here which is nice timing), now I gotta start all over!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr5Q26E-Esw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FB7bwhj4Qw

TIL:
Peter D. Kramer, The LISTENING TO PROZAC guy, is a big Bee tweeter.
There is some kind of big deal fashionista named Lauren Ezersky.

Interesting that I've counted two words that are accepted today that hadn't been previously. We're changing Sam's mind!

Betting one of those words was QIGONG

Nope!

I find it curious they allow "alternate spellings" for some things, but not when its a matter of US/UK.

Yeah it's a very specific thing where multiple Yiddish variants are cool but Briticisms like boyo, yobbo, bobby, totting, etc. are off-limits. Stuff from Spanish is weirdly hit-or-miss, so you can have loco and toro and nada but not papi.

And then there are the UTTERLY BULLSHIT things like muthaflippin QIGONG or PEWEE or RATATAT gah. I started out in this thread kinda defending Sam - or, rather, saying that any specific person would have an equally arbitrary wordlist, even if they had the best of intentions. But I have completely reversed my position.

I have come to the dark side, I feel the hate flowing within me, and it sings like a whippoorwill among the baobabs.

I’ve tried boyo and bobby, but have never heard of yobbo or totting

accepting the constraints of the puzzle and trying to remember the preferred words you’ve encountered so you can dredge them up again weeks or months later is part of the fun. ratatat has come up so often that I now get it right away

I didn’t come across any alternate spellings today

Dan, fyi yobbo derives from yob, which is boy backwards. A Briticism. Also, if you totted up the bill, what you did is called totting. One of the weirder NO BRITISH ALLOWED things is tory, which was, like, an actual word in colonial America, and it meant someone loyal to the British crown. There are books about it.

Almost nothing from the worlds of sailing, architecture, or geology work.

Meanwhile we need to know like seven different New York Jewish deli pastry types, eighty pasta shapes, and like one hundred weird birds. Because those words all qualify as non-obscure words in American English.

(As long as you live in New York City, watch birds, eat pasta, and have a thorough grounding in Yiddish loanwords.)

Beginning to think that Sam's parents were killed by an English architect/sailor with a passion for amateur geology, and this is how he's getting his extremely specific revenge.

Tory is capitalized on Wikipedia and several online dictionaries, so perhaps it is disqualified as too proper a noun.

Ive tried multiple common fish types in past thatve not passed muster, like TREVALLY and ... other ones I cant recall off top of head.

And "PITAPAT" can just jump in the bin.

Tough one today.

TBH I'm a little put off by the complaining about QIGONG yesterday, but I also realize that I'm saying this from a very biased perspective that I have a hard time detaching myself from, which makes it harder for me to accurately gauge how white people would react to it.

Did people complain? Seems like a common enough word these days.

This thread!

Oh yeah, behind the h-tags.

It's not so much that it's too obscure, it's that that word sails through the "nothing too obscure" filter while hundreds of words that we think are common... don't.

It's like, cool if you think QIGONG is common bit of American English. Ditto YENTA or TOWHEE.

But what's off-putting is when you simultaneously think QIGONG is a non-foreign, non-obscure word in American English, but TORTA or TOFF aren't.

It's very selective, and every day it becomes glaringly moreso.

it's just a game though, and it is one that you can learn to get better at

also it's nice learning new words. the one from today that I had never heard of before (and not sure I'll remember) was a bird-related word, towhee

I love the compound words that are reversible, like pinhead and headpin, or today's hometown and townhome

i’ve never heard the latter used so it just annoyed me

Same, me neither.

today’s is rough!

Meant to post that this morning. Totally needed hints.

made it to genius but what a struggle

TIL that FLATFEET is acceptable

I guess it has no hyphen here in the US, but does have one in the UK.

yeah starting to get annoyed with sam again. ALCHEMICAL is most certainly a word.
(putting in spoilers tags because even though it’s not accepted it contains a valid word that is)

ha, just came here to complain about that word too

Sam being Sam again and not accepting a word he used to (in this case OCOTILLO).

I never heard of a boodle, and it still irks me that bole is not acceptable.

Re today’s words: so glad I remembered UNTUNEFUL from the other day.

Yeah that one is out there but at least comprehensible. there is utterly no way I would have gotten venule without hints and guessing

Me neither.

Sometimes when there are this many words it gets to the point where even after I have given up on my own steam (hopefully after getting pangrams and genius) and looking at all the clues I still can't tell which words I missed.

Also, really wanted LENTEN, I assume he left out because usually capitalized.

Again with the formerly-accepted-but-not-today: TELNET.