Wordle. Batman. COVID.

By Ted Potrikus

I’m addicted to Wordle.

It’s a part of the morning routine now – pour the coffee, read the news, tell myself that I’ll wait until later to Wordle, then Wordle nonetheless.

If you’ve not heard about this nifty little online game, a warning: Do it once and you’re hooked. It’s almost too simple – it’s free, it’s not an app that you have to download, there are no ads clogging the site (powerlanguage.co.uk). Once per day, your job is to guess a five-letter word in six tries. That’s it. It’s all the rage on various social media; The New York Times, National Public Radio, and various cable news channels have picked up on the craze. If you’ve got Twitter or Facebook friends, chances are pretty good they’ve bothered your news feed with an update on their daily result.

You get one game per day, then the addicted among us must wait until the next day for the next six-step guessing game.

I write this on the 56th anniversary of the premier of the television series “Batman,” which demanded that we wait 24 hours to tune in at the same Bat-time on the same Bat-channel to find out how the Dynamic Duo defeated a bevy of fiendish criminals to worm its collective way out of certain doom.
Just like Adam West’s “Batman,” Wordle makes us wait for the next day. That might be one of its most addictive qualities.

We don’t wait for anything these days. As my hero Bob Dylan recently penned, “I drive fast cars and I eat fast food.” We binge-watch entire television series in one sitting. Jack McCoy gets his law and order within an hour of us witnessing the crime at hand. We demand to know who won the election two weeks before Election Day. Please don’t bother us with the details, just tell us how it ends.

COVID messes entirely with that mindset. Remember way back when it all started and we marched around all confident that things would be “back to normal” by July 4th (by that I mean July 4, 2020) at the latest? That this was just a disruptive blip on the screen and we’d have all the answers in no time?
Instead, we have to wait. And, thanks to Omicron, wait some more.

Waiting takes time and it’s not easy work. Television condenses a four-day fictional police stakeout into time warp that might look like a couple of officers sipping on cold coffee and staring out the window for a minute or two, so it looks easy. But a stakeout demands long hours of incessant concentration and adherence to the task at hand.

Rather like COVID protocol, I suppose. It takes time, incessant concentration, adherence to the task at hand, and a too-long path toward a return to whatever will be normal when our stakeout is over.
Hence the joy of Wordle, a charming bridge between modern technology and the old-school demand that we wait until tomorrow.

My one Wordle regret is that its developer apparently skipped the copyright step – already there are dozens of rapacious apps out there claiming to be the real thing (the real thing is not an app, it’s the web address at the top of this column). It’s not beyond some Hollywood bozo to ruin it before long – a summer replacement game show airing five nights a week with hyper-stylized cutaway shots of an audience paid to be amazed as game players challenge each other to guess five-letter words while dressed in impossible costumes or facing a stone-faced three-judge panel commenting on the quality of each word they guess.

For the time being, though, may I recommend Wordle in its purist form – a simple, unadorned website offering a little bit of ad-free, free-of-charge amusement that pairs perfectly with your morning beverage of choice and can take your mind off whatever stakeout crowds your mind.