January 11, 2012 

Every morning before work I work on a little puzzle on the NYT site. It’s called Spelling Bee and the object of the game is to make as many words out of 7 letters. The rules are as follows:

•         Words must contain at least 4 letters.
•         Words must include the center letter.
•         No obscure, hyphenated, or proper nouns.
•         No swear words.
•         Letters can be used more than once.
•         4-letter words are worth 1 point each.
•         Longer words earn 1 point per letter.
•         Each puzzle includes at least one “pangram” which uses every letter. These are worth 7 extra points!

I like this game for a number of reasons:  

1. It jump starts my brain;
2. It reminds me every day to look at things from all angles. You see, you can rotate the letters so that they line up differently. Doing so always allows you to ‘see’ new words; and.  
3. I ‘compete’ with my son and daughter-in-law to see who can get to ‘genius’ level the fastest. They are both super smart so I like the high level stakes. We chat on line and cheer each other on. 

But, sometimes (like today), I will find a word that I think fits, but isn’t acceptable. 

Today I saw the word

‘finicula’ immediately – AND it was a panagram (extra points!)  But… Beeatrice Buzzby  at the NYTimes thought otherwise:  

Thanks for solving and taking the time to offer us a word suggestion today!

While proper names and words that contain hyphens or apostrophes are not part of our word list, every Spelling Bee puzzle is hand-curated to focus on relatively common words, with a couple of tough ones here and there to keep it challenging. In fairness to our wide-ranging audience, Spelling Bee generally avoids terms that are hyper-specific to any professional field, such as terms that might be familiar to, say, a physician or geologist, but not people outside of that area of expertise.

Buzzby, Beeatrice <buzzwords@nytimes.com>

Buzzoff Beeatrice!

However, just moments after I received this deflating, canned response, my son sent me a Tweet from a jazz dude that we both love. I had no idea that Vijay Iyer also spent part of his morning that same way we do. What a cool connection. But, most importantly this was validation! 

 And that brought me all sorts of happiness today.