NIGHT SWEATS

I recall reading, a long time ago, that English has an unusually large number of words, the consequence as I recall of its being the fusion of a Germanic language – Anglo-Saxon – and a Latinate language – early French. This, I believe, was offered as the explanation for the richness of Shakespeare’s language. This fact about English contributes to the difficulty of the online word game Wordle, hosted by the New York Times. For those who are unfamiliar with the game, you are required to guess a five letter word in six tries (proper names, plurals, and gerunds not permitted.) If your guess contains a letter in the hidden word the letter lights up in orange and if it is in the correct place as well it lights up in green.

 

To see why the richness of English poses problems, suppose you have somehow guessed the word “round” on your second try, and suppose further that the o, the u, the n, and the d all light up green. You might think you were on your way to an easy win but there are actually seven remaining words possible and only four guesses left. The seven words are bound, found, hound, mound, pound, sound, and wound. What to do? Well, as your third try you can type in “swamp.” That contains four of the possible letters. If one of them lights up you can solve the puzzle in four tries – a pretty good result. If none of them light up try “beach.” Now you can solve the puzzle on the fifth try. This avoids the condescending “whew,” which the WORDLE bot offers as a consolation for those solving the puzzle in six tries.

 

Last night, I found myself at 3 AM half awake and thinking obsessively of all five letter words that end in “irth.” Since I was doing all this in my head I included five and six letter words that sounded as though they were spelled this way. So I came up with birth, dearth, earth, girth, mirth, and worth.  Still unable to go back to sleep, I started thinking up book titles using these words. Here are some of what I came up with:

 

The Birth of Earth: a pictorial history of the origin of the solar system for readers of all ages.

The Birth of Mirth: the development of humor in ancient Greece.

The Mirth of Birth: jokes told by doulas.

The Mirth of Girth: fat jokes from old vaudeville routines

The Birth of Dearth: socioeconomic causes of poverty.

The Dearth of Birth: low fertility rates in Europe and China.

The Worth of Girth: obesity as an emblem of social status in premodern societies.

 

At this point I fell back into a fretful sleep.