When Wordle first landed, more than three years ago, a lot of Britons complained, bitterly, about the American spellings, taking to social media to rage that there was no such word as “favor” and what fresh illiteracy was this? Very gradually, we just adapted. They had to choose one dictionary; who says it had to be ours? Especially given that Wordle is now owned by the New York Times.
Nowadays, I deliberately forget how to spell “colour” – not just for Wordle, but also for Quordle (which is basically four Wordles at once) – so often that I have given up even wishing for something different. But then I added the NYT’s Connections (a grid of 16 words that you have to sort into four categories) to my morning puzzling roster. Never mind the spellings – now I have to look up American types of cracker, women’s national basketball teams, slang terms for “loo”.
Feeling that I hadn’t greeted the day without wasting quite enough time, I then added Phrazle, which is a whole new world of words I have never heard uttered in conjunction with one another. “Loaded for bear” means “exceptionally well prepared” – guessable, I suppose, but you really have to think yourself into another culture, where it is normal to have a gun and see a bear.
A “Monday morning quarterback” is someone who reprimands others for their handling of a situation that has already passed. I don’t think we even have a phrase for that – “moving the goalposts” was offered by some Quora wiseguy, but it isn’t quite in the same – how does one put it? – ballpark. Even if you knew what a quarterback is and the day on which most NFL games are played (Sunday), I still don’t think you would arrive at the sense unaided. And if I really drill in, I don’t think I have ever met one of these unwanted, late advice-givers. Maybe they exist only in the US.
Still, I persist, I accommodate; it turns out I will do anything in the service of the puzzle. If it came to it, I would be happy to synthesise American and British English and start putting Zs in everything. Sorry, I mean “synthesize”.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
