Claire and I both try to get our brains working, over the first coffee of the day, with puzzles. Wordle precedes Quordle, before I move on to Sudoku. As a result, sometimes I feel guilty, it seems like procrastination. That’s because I should be researching my next book, or marketing my published books. .Am I just putting off the moment of getting down to work?
It is something that we do together, and it’s only mildly competitive. We each use different Quordle apps, so we can help each other out without giving anything away. Therefore I think it does help exercise the brain before writing, and we work together. For example, in Claire’s Quordle this morning she was on her last chance to find a word. She had _O_E_ and there was an M in it somewhere. There were very few letters left to use. The only word that seemed to fit was GOLEM. We both assumed that couldn’t be correct. Surely it’s a proper noun? Golem is a character in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
So I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. I discovered that (in Jewish legend) golem is a clay figure brought to life by magic. It also means automaton or robot. The origin of the word is late 19th century Yiddish goylem from the Hebrew golem, meaning shapeless mass.
I had assumed that Tolkien just made up the character name. I should have known better. Today’s procrastination over puzzles has taught me a new word, and given me an insight into the method of one of our greatest writers.
Returning to Wordle and Quordle, my starting word is IRATE. If that doesn’t yield anything to work with, my next attempt is COYPU. I have now covered all the vowels and Y which sometimes pretends to be a vowel. I’m sure I could improve my method by borrowing from Sir Anthony Standen. I did quite a lot of research into cipher breaking for The Spy who Sank the Armada. Perhaps I should revise frequency analysis, the frequency with which letters and combination of letters appear in our language. However, perhaps the setters have got there before me, and tried to find the least common combinations. I’ll give it a try and report back to you. Or is that just more procrastination?