In addition to being the 5th anniversary of the official start of the COVID pandemic, yesterday was also the day that the New York Times published the 2500th edition of the daily Spelling Bee puzzle. As an avid fan of the Spelling Bee, I was delighted.
It was also a very special day in Spelling Bee land because yesterday, for the first time, the creators of that puzzle broke one of their most notable rules: Among the seven letters, yesterday’s puzzle included the letter “s”.
Of course the inclusion of the letter “s” changes the puzzle greatly. You suddenly get double the number of nouns and verbs, because for those words you can just add an “s” to the end.
Some people might object to this sudden change in their daily word puzzle. Personally, I thought it was fabulous.