Today’s Wordle Review: May 21, 2023

Welcome to The Wordle Review. Be warned: This article contains spoilers for today’s puzzle. Solve Wordle first, or scroll at your own risk.

This month’s featured artist is Colin Laurel. You can read more about him here.

★★★★★

Wordle 701 3/6*

🟨⬜🟩🟨⬜ STARE
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 CRASH
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 BRASH

I’m often surprised by how Wordle words can invoke vivid feelings. Looking at my guesses, I see a story that seems to write itself.

As a lifelong New Yorker, I did not get my driver’s license until after college, but my parents enrolled me in a driving course at a private high school on the Upper East Side when I was 16. I was a student at a public high school downtown, and the culture shock was, well, real. It was immersion therapy: The school would pile four pimply permit-holders into a vehicle with an instructor and we would each have 20 minutes to drive around Park and Lexington Avenues. I learned exactly nothing, and I’m not sure driver’s education even works like that anymore.

I’ve mostly driven in and around New York. Especially when I started out, I sat white-knuckled at the steering wheel in traffic. When I talk to people about that experience, some tend to tense up at the thought of the situations I’ve had to face while driving and proclaim that if I can do it here, I can do it anywhere. I’m still not convinced. That’s what came to mind when I solved today’s Wordle: hours of staring at the road, hoping not to CRASH.

The solution fits in well with this story, too. On the road and off, New Yorkers are assumed to be more BRASH than people who come from other places in the country, and maybe in the world. But we can all sometimes be guilty of acting without thought or care. I lived in the South for a bit as a kid, so I try to inject my personality with some hospitality as well.

Tell me in the comments the word associations you have when you look at your guesses for today. What does this word bring up? When you combine it with your other guesses, what personal story comes to mind?

Today’s Wordle gets five stars because I like BRASH. It sounds exactly like what it means.

Today’s word is BRASH, an adjective. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it describes a rash, impudent mood or personality.

Today’s Statistics

Today’s puzzle is moderately easy.

The letter pattern in today’s word is unique enough that the answer can be found within six guesses, and the word is familiar, with no letter repeats.

Our Featured Artist

Colin Laurel is a Black illustrator with an affinity for bold line work and joyous expression. He uses his identity as a lens through which to provide healing imagery to queer and marginalized communities, and he has referred to his art as a form of self-care. Mr. Laurel is influenced by vintage movie posters, production art, video games, music and mythology. With each piece, he hopes to convey humanity’s relationship with the beauty of nature.

Further Reading

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