Wonderous and silly things

[bwt1213]

My wife and I have also wondered about the demographic of wordtwist players. I showed her on the leaderboards RussDNails, who had more total points than I did for the month of December, and she surmised that he was some guy with no job living in a trailer. I don't believe that is accurate but would love to know lol. 33 year old male in Pennsylvania here

I can't answer for RussDNails, but from what I know and surmise, you're about as wrong as possible. I'm 74 years old, retired, and enjoy words and word games. I probably play WT far too much. But I would not ever make anything that might sound like a disparaging comment about the life, habits, or occupation of any other WT player. Not even in jest.

[Denali87]

My wife and I have also wondered about the demographic of wordtwist players. I showed her on the leaderboards RussDNails, who had more total points than I did for the month of December, and she surmised that he was some guy with no job living in a trailer. I don't believe that is accurate but would love to know lol. 33 year old male in Pennsylvania here

[Denali87]

My wife is complaining that the keyboard is not working as well, I tend to hit the keys more aggressively in that last 15 second flurry of inspiration to rack up those decisive points, or like as leabhar says when you have try to type "tiro" multiple times and it doesn't register. I remember thinking the program was glitched when I kept typing in "diew"..after the fact I realized the word I was going for was spelled "deaw". "Peag" is also another fav of mine. I did not know "kier" was dutch. There is an indian dessert called "Kheer" (wonder if that works for wordtwist?), and that's always what I thought of when playing "kier"

[dannyb]

I am on my third keyboard since I started playing this game. I wore off the a, r, s and t on the first keyboard. I wore them off on the second one but I taped little labels on the keys, I also broke the return key (beyond repair). On this keyboard the letters are about 60% worn off.

[DonGuy47]

...The "a" key has a tiny speck about the size of a dust particle on it. The "e" and "s" keys are completely bare of any markings whatever. Part of the "c" key is missing paint near the top, so the upper right of the "c" has worn down to look a little like a sideways "u". About half the upper part of the "N" is gone.

My m and n are gone, v is going, and o and d are badly disfigured. Maybe it has to do with where your finger hits the key, and these are they keys I hit in their upper left corners, where the markings used to be?

[leabhar]

Hi fellow Boggle players. I am not among the superstar players of this site but I would like to acknowledge some of the players who I see continually with the higher scores in 5x5. When I see names like scheffek, regimentus, DrPlacebo, Ellen, knishes9 I know it is going to be very challenging to beat that high score. When I see MegaWord, I know a good game would be to get over 50% of his score, or just find one or two words that he overlooked. I hope that one day people will see my name with a high score and think they are going to be in for a challenge. Til then I keep practicing. Only recently did I add "eane" to my repertoire. How frustrating that all those times I typed "steane" I missed out on the points of "eane" Some other little words I like is "owre" and I recently learned not to miss "keir" when I play "kier" and "nief" "nife" and "syen" "snye" "syne".
I swear sometimes I have played a work that works and then in another game that same word doesnt work. I play Taos and Tosa all the time but then once I swear Toas worked, then it never did again.

Correct, I have the same experience. Tiro will work sometimes, other times not. There are more smaller words that sometimes work and sometimes not. Very annoying. By the way, kier is a Dutch word as well

[Denali87]

Hi fellow Boggle players. I am not among the superstar players of this site but I would like to acknowledge some of the players who I see continually with the higher scores in 5x5. When I see names like scheffek, regimentus, DrPlacebo, Ellen, knishes9 I know it is going to be very challenging to beat that high score. When I see MegaWord, I know a good game would be to get over 50% of his score, or just find one or two words that he overlooked. I hope that one day people will see my name with a high score and think they are going to be in for a challenge. Til then I keep practicing. Only recently did I add "eane" to my repertoire. How frustrating that all those times I typed "steane" I missed out on the points of "eane" Some other little words I like is "owre" and I recently learned not to miss "keir" when I play "kier" and "nief" "nife" and "syen" "snye" "syne".
I swear sometimes I have played a work that works and then in another game that same word doesnt work. I play Taos and Tosa all the time but then once I swear Toas worked, then it never did again.

[floppers]

Defininitely qualifies as wonderous, but not so silly. A, E and S are so frequently used in the English (and American) language, not so sure about the c and the n (however, I have used the "n" ten times using only one full stop (thats "period" in American), the "c" not so much). I'm a soft touch, typing and speaking, (except when I'm coaching), but I know that the Father of my children implies intent and passion in his keystrokes. I'm hoping that we can all recognise, particularly as we live in a temperate climate in Australia, that I find that more silly than wonderous.

I'm loving that you are more than a Rachmaninoff, than a Chopin, even though there is an equal use of "n" and "c" in both....

[bwt1213]

I don't know if this is more silly than wonderous, but I looked at my keyboard of my three-year-old laptop and realized that some of the keys have basically no markings on them any more. The "a" key has a tiny speck about the size of a dust particle on it. The "e" and "s" keys are completely bare of any markings whatever. Part of the "c" key is missing paint near the top, so the upper right of the "c" has worn down to look a little like a sideways "u". About half the upper part of the "N" is gone. None of the other keys show any signs of wear whatever. When I was a far younger lad, I played the piano a lot and loved to play loud -- think Rachmaninoff rather than Chopin, though I confess I loved Bach and Beethoven. When I was in the Army and had to type as part of my job, all the typewriters were manual, most with bent keyboards from years of relentless hammering. And typing in subzero weather with no heat pretty much forced me to hit the keys hard to transfer any ink from the ribbon to the paper. I learned the habit of just beating on the keyboard, and it's hard to break it. But I find it hard to explain the peculiar pattern of wear. Any ideas?

[Brisul]

I don't dump many games any more, and I'm less picky than I was about the ones I like to play, so my per-game average on the 5x5 took a hit. I dump now if I'm called away from the game or get a phone call. But it is nice to be able to say: "gee, too bad. I got only X on that one" instead of getting upset over what is, after all, just a game.

I'm not going for the super high scores I was aiming for during the past couple of months because I'm just not fast enough to be a 1000+ point per game player and do it over 51 or more games per month like the super star players here do. But, I'm trying to raise my career average which is still currently under 900. It will be pretty neat to get it up over 900 on a personal level.

[bwt1213]

I don't dump many games any more, and I'm less picky than I was about the ones I like to play, so my per-game average on the 5x5 took a hit. I dump now if I'm called away from the game or get a phone call. But it is nice to be able to say: "gee, too bad. I got only X on that one" instead of getting upset over what is, after all, just a game.

[Brisul]

Not wonderful, but definitely silly: I have had this OCD like compulsion that I can't "drop" a game unless I have scored at least 300 points. There have been some crazy last few second flurries. This habit has probably cost my scoring average several points each month. (The tough ones are when I finally cross the 300 point mark and the game times out before I can "drop" it.) Yesterday, for the first time, I looked at my score 268 points with 12 seconds to go and I "dropped" the game. It felt surprisingly good. I hope I can do that from now on.

I'm the same way a lot of times. In the 5X5 games, I like to at least hit 500. This month though, I was dumping out early on games where it was obvious early on that I was not going to get anywhere...even on boards where, by the overall word count, I SHOULD have. All that aside, I played enough games to qualify this month for the first time in two or three months

[leabhar]

Both of my parents were born in the Netherlands, and although I grew up in Canada, Dutch traditions plus a few Dutch words were common in my childhood. Typical of kids, the first things we picked up were obscenties. And the first two words in your list were among them! I'm now making an effort to truly learn Dutch via DuoLingo but I'm fairly confident those gems won't pop up LOL!

I think it's impressive that you're playing word games in your second (or third or fourth) language. Well done!

Thank you. I use Duolingo as well to brush up on my languages. English is my second language: my husband hails from South Dakota. It is funny how many foreign words pop up in here and sometimes have a complete different meaning. Most of the time I can find the smaller words in the heavily played boards that I know from other languages. As for Dutch swear words: there will be a few available on certain Dutch sites on Facebook

[sadied]

I wonder why in one game the word "sero" is accepted and in another not. I have that happen before and for a long time I doubted myself, but I wrote it down and now know for sure that some words are acctepted in one game, but not in the other.

On a lighter tone: I am not a native speaker and my native language is Dutch. So I did two games today and much to my surprise (and laughter) I found three Dutch words (which of course were not valid, but it was just funny to see THOSE words there in two consecutive games: kloten, kloot and bips.
For those curious, Google translate helps

Both of my parents were born in the Netherlands, and although I grew up in Canada, Dutch traditions plus a few Dutch words were common in my childhood. Typical of kids, the first things we picked up were obscenties. And the first two words in your list were among them! I'm now making an effort to truly learn Dutch via DuoLingo but I'm fairly confident those gems won't pop up LOL!

I think it's impressive that you're playing word games in your second (or third or fourth) language. Well done!

[dannyb]

Not wonderful, but definitely silly: I have had this OCD like compulsion that I can't "drop" a game unless I have scored at least 300 points. There have been some crazy last few second flurries. This habit has probably cost my scoring average several points each month. (The tough ones are when I finally cross the 300 point mark and the game times out before I can "drop" it.) Yesterday, for the first time, I looked at my score 268 points with 12 seconds to go and I "dropped" the game. It felt surprisingly good. I hope I can do that from now on.