Pop Culture Care Package: Bee Scolding

Being at home a whole lot more at home for the last few months has led me to a better understanding of myself as a deeply competitive and silly person. This self-revelation has been nowhere more evident than in a renewed interest in trivia competitions — here is where I heap blessings upon the shining, beloved heads of Quarantizzo Quizmaster Craig and Learned League referrer Margaret for increasing my daily and weekly doses of trivia — and in my sending the New York Frickety Fracking Times more of my money to play their infernally addictive daily Spelling Bee puzzle.

Spelling Bee is a delightful cheap little daily thrill for a great speller who also fundamentally chafes at rules she finds silly and at garbagey exclusions based in (perhaps unconscious but nonetheless harmful) racism and stick-in-the-muddiness regarding slang and neologisms.

This is a literary term, for goodness’ sake!

See, the way the Bee works is that you get seven letters to play with. All words you submit must be at least four letters long and must include the center letter. When you play online, you can shuffle the order of all of the letters (except the center letter) whenever you want. There’s no limit on the number of times you can shuffle the letters, and there’s no limit on the number of words you can submit for possible points. The range of points you can earn varies daily. The problem is that lots of words in common use — almost always terms that arise from African-American Vernacular English or are borrowed into English from other languages — aren’t considered valid.

We can’t help noticing that these tend to be terms not in use by the white grandparental types who are the likely strongest demographic for the Bee. To which I can only say, congratulations on your longevity! Guess what, it’s never too late to learn new vocab and to advocate for its inclusion in this super-fun puzzle!

Come on, Bee!

So on the one hand: I get to find words! I earn points on my word-finding prowess! Yay! And then I get to scowl and rage about all the words the Bee should accept but doesn’t! I screencap them and either tweet them or text them to a friend or both, and eventually, I came to the conclusion that no matter how frequently I score a pangram or find an unexpected word long after I think I’ve exhausted all my options, sometimes the Bee doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about. And by “sometimes” I mean “at least once daily”.

Obviously, times being what they are, when my darling Internet Ladyfriend Karen Corday suggested we write a newsletter dedicated to our grievances, I jumped at the chance. It is my pleasure to share with Dames Nation the glories of Bee Scolding, in which Karen and I share screencaps and scathing, witty commentary on the Bee’s flaws, and also occasionally Actual Bee Content.

New Jersey erasure too, now?

We’ve published a whopping one issue so far! We have another one in the can set to go out on Thursday! We are very silly, we offer this service journalism for free & for fun, and we have no set publishing schedule! If this seems up your alley, subscribe & pass it around to all your pals!

Fly strong & free (from outdated “rules”), darling pollinator!