The NYT Spelling Bee’s unique vocabulary
Published by marco on
I was mystified as to what the final four-letter word starting with “EN” might be, and finally landed on the four-letter combination “ENBY” and had to admit that I’d never heard of this short word before. This doesn’t happen a lot.
NY Times Spelling Bee thinks 'Enby' is a word
What the hell does it even mean? The Free Dictionary doesn’t know what it is. DuckDuckGo returns a link to Nichtbinäre Geschlechtsidentität (Wikipedia) (my settings prefer Swiss-German results), which is the Non-binary (Wikipedia) (which is much less obviously related to gender than the German title), which allowed me to finally figure out that “enby” is a phoneticization of the letters “N” and “B”.
The only reason I’m pointing this out is that the NY Times’s wokeness is still quite evident in this example, as they recognize a word that isn’t in the dictionary but is inclusive and is, apparently, well-known enough among its customers, but they ignore hundreds of other words that I—and the dictionary—consider to be more or less common. They seem to be particularly stubbornly allergic to any word that might be construed as a slur but are also fiercely allergic to science words.
Already back in 2021, I wrote the following note into the article linked above.
Update 15.05.2021: After over a year of playing this puzzle, the patterns are pretty clear. Proper words are allowed if it’s a fruit, fish, plant, flower, type of cheese, or songbird. Or if it has something to do with Judaism and Jewish tradition. Minyan was in the puzzle yesterday, which is a word simply everyone knows and uses every day. What is glaringly obvious is the anti-science, anti-math bent to this whole puzzle. Building blocks of reality, like pion, muon, and lepton aren’t recognized, but obscure cacti are, as well as all manner of lilies, like canna and calla.
Where Judaic—minyan or tallit—and LGBTQ words—enby—feature prominently, science and engineering words—pion, muon, monadic, molal, decile, egyptology, enqueue, lexeme, moonlet, lidar, nacelle, fairing—regular words—midden, menage, drily, lungful, lede, monofin, nictitate, olla, phaeton, geegaw, gibbet, lamplit, immanent, headball, gnomon, gnomic, zoonotic—some of which might feel rare, but some of which are regularly used—and, finally, quasi-slurs—golliwog, chink, flatulate, gypped, ladyboy, minge, niggly, octaroon, polygyny, raping—don’t. They even allow words like “gully” but not “wadi”, which seems a bit racist. It’s unclear why they choose to recognize “tomtit” but not “woodlark”.
These are decisions made by their editor that illustrate the shape of his and the paper’s ideology.