Wordle, the New York Times and Newspeak

 

On January 31, 2022, the New York Times announced that it had purchased the rights to a cute little word-playing game called Wordle that had become an international sensation. My first thought was, "Oh no, the Times is going to ruin it. They'll put it behind a paywall or throw advertisements around it." Which was kind of sad because many friends and family members were playing it and it had become a daily source of entertainment, especially the trash-talking. Little did I know what the New York Times would do to it.

My first inkling of their incompetence occurred on February 15th. In their haste to cut over from the old version on a UK server to their version on a NYT server, both servers were active. Inexplicably, if you connected to the UK version, the word of the day was AGORA. If you connected to the NYT version, the word of the day was AROMA. This should have immediately set off an alarm bell in my head. After all, the true genius of the game is how simply it is constructed. Its code contains the entire database of words that can be used for answers, and each answer is linked to a specific date. As such, the only way that the two versions could yield different answers is if the list of possible answers had been altered. And that's exactly what had happened.

By an astounding coincidence, the first Wordle word of the NYT era was AGORA, a word that is pretty obscure to the average American. As such, the NYT decided to eliminate it from the list of valid answers and the word AROMA (the next word on the list) was used instead. While they were eliminating words, The Times also decided to get rid of words with British-specific spelling like FIBRE, which also seemed reasonable.

Then, they went berserk. 

Someone managed to convince the powers that be that "sensitive or offensive" words needed to be eliminated too. Words like SLAVE, WENCH, WHORE and LYNCH. Not only would these words never appear as answers, they would not even be accepted as guesses. Ironically, all of these words can be found in articles written by the Times!

With this in place, imagine your frustration when you're in mid-Wordle and the consonants W, H, and R are still in play along with the vowels E and O. Maddeningly, you'll be unable to guess WHORE.  Almost certainly it wouldn't be the correct answer to the puzzle but it would greatly improve your chances of winning on the next guess. 

But that's actually the least objectionable aspect of this.

When a friend of mine heard about this, he sent me a one-word text: Newspeak. If you're unfamiliar with the term it probably means you've never read "1984", the classic novel by George Orwell. Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, a totalitarian regime, and was used to restrict ideas, thoughts and communication. As an example, Newspeak didn't have a word for freedom, so the concept of freedom didn't exist either. Negative words were replaced by words preceded by "un-"; the word "bad" became "ungood". Orwell's warning: a government that creates the language and mandates how it is used can control the minds of its citizens.

The NYT is hardly a totalitarian regime. But it was dabbling in a bit of Newspeak when it decided to eliminate a perfectly valid collection of non-obscene words from our thought process. Yes, enslaving someone is objectionable, but knowing about slavery, being able to converse about slavery or being able to joke that you are a "slave to your job" is perfectly reasonable. Calling a woman a "bitch" might be harsh but commiserating with someone by saying "life's a bitch" is hardly objectionable.

By calling these words "insensitive or offensive" and eliminating them from being used in a silly little word game, the NYT gave credence to all of its detractors who constantly accuse them as being absurdly politically correct. 

Postscript:

The above Letter to the Editor was never published by the New York Times. In fact, I never got any response whatsoever from the Times. So, as promised, I canceled my subscription on February 23, 2022. But I wasn't able to unsubscribe simply by email. The Times made me interact via chat with an individual labeled as "steven". Our exchange (edited for brevity) can be read by clicking here.

 Just as I had hoped, my bold and courageous stance against Big Brother-like censorship had made an immediate and undeniable impact:

It's not important that their stock price rebounded to 43.99 less than a week later. My point had been made.