Tuesday night Nicole read me an article about how to choose the first word for Wordle. If you haven't played this daily word puzzle craze, yet, it's basically the number game we used to play, which Lydia has learned as "pica, Fermi, bagel", except it's letters, there are five of them, and your guesses are constrained to be words. Anyway, I disagreed with some of the article, and Nicole challenged me to write my own.
I haven't done that yet, but I was at least thinking about algorithms instead of falling asleep. This evening, I got thirty minutes on the computer and implemented the first part. It'll take another day or two to get through it. Until then, Wordle can still be a fun game.
Wednesday Nicole had scheduled dentist appointments for herself and some kids, and had a dermatology appointment, too, so she again abstained from teaching. She walked Colin and Eric to the dentist after school, and then I took Lydia on the bike a while later and waited for the boys to be done. Rachel was home when we got back.
The kids missed piano because of this, but Lydia had a make up session in the evening. Before that, Eric wanted to do an Unlock! puzzle, so I played through the one from Lydia's birthday with him—Sherlock Holmes themed. It went fine, but we ran out of time somehow, even though I basically knew what to do.
I read in the basement while Eric played on the Switch during Lydia's lesson. I did another few pages of Les Chouans looking for a new word for today. I thought it would be fun to do a French word of the day while I'm reading regularly. But I found only a few that were borderline familiar, like subit, essuyer, and accabler. I did learn that the imperfect subjunctive of venir is weird, though, from the word vinssent. Two esses after en? Accabler, which I guess may be best translated as overwhelm, is etymologically related to catapult.
5 comments:
Interesting. I didn't know that about venir.
I don't think I ever learned the imperfect subjunctive, even in my college grammar class. There is a section about it in my textbook from that course, though (which of course I still have)::
"Des quatre temps du subjonctif, deux ne sont pratiquement jamais employés dans la conversation: l'imparfait et le plus-que-parfait. Même dans la langue littéraire, les auteurs modernes ont tendance à les éviter. Au subjonctif, l'imparfait est généralement remplacé par le présent, et le plus-que-parfait par le passé. Il est cependant indispensable de savoir au moins reconnaître ces deux temps aujourd'hui en décadence, que l'on rencontre souvent chez les écrivains classiques."
The double s appears to be a hallmark of the tense, but only tenir and venir put it adjacent to a consonant.
The example from Balzac is: "En ce moment, le feu roulait avec une étonnante vivacité, mais sans que les deux partis en vinssent aux mains." I haven't noticed other instances, but I probably will now.
Will the Wordle algorithm be shareable?
It would be nice if it could be shared beyond the blog. I'll figure out a way, assuming I get that far.
You must write your own article in response to that other one and get it published in the same place.
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