Róisín Ingle: I have a great Wordle start word – it’s just a bit rude

Are you still doing Wordle? I only ask because my mother, once an avid fan, has given it up. “I don’t see the point,” she told me the other day. “I know I can do it easily so I’ve nothing to prove to myself any more.”

Her more challenging daily puzzle remains The Irish Times Crosaire. Not the Simplex crossword, just to be clear. The Simplex is the crossword with the straightforward clues, the one that makes sense to most of us. The Simplex, clue very much in the name, is only for low-achieving eejits like me. The Crosaire, my mother maintains, is an actual challenge with clues that as far as I can see make no sense unless you are part of the international Crosaire cult. “She delivered your cousins with endless jeers (4)” for just one recent, head-wrecking example. I’m not a member of this cult but I do have two friends living in different countries who race each other every day to see how long it takes them to finish the Crosaire.

I have never finished a Crosaire. My head melts even at the thought of the thing. And while I was very late to Wordle, it’s now become a daily ritual that I can’t seem to quit. I resisted for ages, until a dyslexic friend of mine started sending me her results on WhatsApp delighted with herself. Her joy at being able to complete the word puzzle despite her dyslexia was infectious and now most mornings start with our little exchange of Wordle results.

This column is also very late to Wordle. At this point, all the columns in the world have already been written about the online word game. You already know that it was invented by Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle for his partner who really got into puzzles during the pandemic. You know that the ingeniously simple premise is to guess a new five letter word each day in six goes or less by a process of elimination, a bit like a word version of the game Mastermind except using letters instead of colours. You know that the game was bought from clever Josh Wardle for a lot of money by the New York Times which is where people now play it, so far for no fee. You know that people are still, inexplicably, posting their results on social media as though anybody else in the world is interested in whether it took them three, four or five goes to get their Wordle.

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So chances are you probably know all you will ever need to know about Wordle but, hang on a minute, do you know about the Marian Keyes Method (MKM)? If you are a twitter user, you may well know about this method which was invented (patent pending) by best-selling author Marian Keyes. But something us media people tend to forget or wilfully ignore is that not everybody is on twitter, so it’s reasonable to assume many of you will not know about the MKM.

It turns out shite as a starter word works on so many levels

Marian initially came up with her method, a faintly rude starter word widely used in this country, as a sort of protest against Wordle. Annoyingly, her partner Tony was happily solving the Wordle in two or three goes while Marian herself was failing badly and sometimes not even getting it in six. She wanted to break it off with Wordle but found herself addicted. To vent her frustration at the Wordle gods, one day she decided to use shite as her five letter starter word. She did not think shite would be accepted as a valid word by the venerable New York Times but lo, the word did not wobble ominously on her screen as is the case with words that are not Wordle-approved. Shite, amazingly, appeared to be kosher. Marian announced the advent of the MKM on twitter in this way: “For the last several days – to passive-aggressively demonstrate my enmeshed hatred for Wordle – my first word has been ‘shite’ – and each time I’ve solved the whole miserable business in THREE lines! Stand up! Fight back!”

Many of us have been fighting back, or more accurately shiteing back, ever since. It turns out shite as a starter word works on so many levels. First of all, it has proven to be an excellent word that most of the time sets the player off on a positive footing with regard to guessing the correct answer. Containing, as it does, an ‘s’, a ‘h’, a ‘t’ and two useful vowels, it’s eminently practical. You can only imagine the thrill experienced by us shitehawks when a recent Wordle solution turned out to be shine. Us proponents of shite got it in two goes that day but many of us still managed to resist posting our results on social media knowing, and this bears repeating, that NOBODY else cares about our Wordle results.

Starting your day off with shite is also oddly satisfying in other ways. It tells Wordle that Wordle is not the boss of you, no matter how badly you perform that day. By typing shite into the little boxes you are registering your dismay that you are unable to wean yourself off Wordle. You are using a uniquely Irish expression in a game invented in America. And you are also, more generally, expressing dissatisfaction with whatever shite thing is irritating you that day, eg Dublin Airport. As James Joyce once exclaimed in a 1920 letter: “O shite and onions! When is this bloody state of affairs going to end?”

Sorry, I’ll stop shiteing on now. I’d just like, on behalf of us daily users, to formally thank Marian Keyes for the MKM. It really is the greatest load of shite.