Unforgiven: Lies About Your Word Game Prowess

When you think you’re Queen Bee, but you’re King Robert

Recently, my husband and I had dinner with another couple. She is an old friend; her boyfriend is a recent addition.

I wanted to like this guy for her sake. But he went on and on about the make of car he drove, the clubs he belonged to, the exotic places he’d visited — all things I had zero interest in. Still, I know people like him are insecure, and I was ready to try to get passed it. I figured he might calm down after we got to know each other a bit.

Until he got to boasting about his word game scores.

He insisted (though he didn’t show me) that he had a 100+ day streak on Wordle. And that he always reached Queen Bee on the New York Times’s Spelling Bee.

All you have to do is have one conversation with this guy to know it can’t be true. He doesn’t read books. He is, by his own admission, a terrible speller. His vocabulary is not expansive.

My husband couldn’t understand why I was so worked up. He gets why I was exasperated by the guy’s bragging. What my husband couldn’t wrap his head around was why the score inflation so upset me.

Then again, he also can’t understand why I don’t want to turn out the light until I reach “Genius” on the Bee, or why I’m distraught when I break my Wordle streak, either because of a time change while traveling, or because I just didn’t get the correct word in…