Yesterday, the socials were torn up with complaints about the Wordle word of the day. Wordle renews at midnight, and some people rush to solve it first. I usually play it in the middle day, and yesterday I happened to see the angst from other players ahead of time.

The word was parer. It’s not Merrium-Websters or Oxford, but it is the American Heritage. This is enough to inspire fulminating effusions of grief over how hard the game is or the loss of a win streak. It’s not even a real word, they say.

I did guess this word, perhaps because it’s one in another word game I play but perhaps because the perceived difficulty of a Wordle level depends on your starting word. You could go vowel heavy (audio, ideas, adieu) or consonant heavy (smart, plumb, track). You could attempt more common letters (scope, trace, broke).

I like word light (or sight, might, fight) because of the common letters. If H is eliminated, then CH and SH are too. If I is out, then AI, OI, EI are too.

But with a word like parer, if you approach it as PA_ER, then you can see the potential for angst. Is it paper, paver, pager? When you have a word like this, it’s good to attempt a word with three possible letters, like grave, so if all three out, you can attempt a fourth option, like the P if the R hadn’t been the answer.

I’m sure, as they say in the podcasts, nobody cares. Let’s move on.

Manhood: For the Church | Episode 177: Brant Hansen on The Men We Need. Here’s an enjoyable podcast ep. on a manhood book that may be more grounded than some of those you’ve heard about. Hansen, an “Avid Indoorsman,” appears to keep his advice within the bounds of Scripture and argue for flip-flops as a sign of failed masculinity.

True Crime: “Nothing But the Night takes readers back to 1924, when two students at the University of Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, kidnapped a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks and callously killed him. When the crime came to trial, Leopold and Loeb were defended by the celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose passionate courtroom antics were read in newspapers and circulated like the latest radio drama.” (Get the book here)

Education: In the book Letters Along the Way, a young believer says he intends to go to Yale to help Christians gain academic respectability. The corresponding senior saint writes, “At the risk of sounding pedantic (though realizing I sometimes come across that way), I doubt very much that evangelicals are wise to pursue academic respectability. What we need is academic responsibility. There is a world of difference.”

Jazz: In the current issue of ByFaith (not yet online), there’s a conversation with jazz pianist William Edgar, who is also a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary. He says, “I used to be fairly pessimistic about the future of jazz, but then I listen to these guys like Jon Baptiste or the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, and it’s the real thing. . . . it’s the theme of my book, ‘from deep misery to inextinguishable joy.’ You can’t take a shortcut to the joy, because it becomes happiness instead. You also can’t swell in the sin without becoming morbid. Jazz is that journey that goes from one place to the others.”

You can listen to Jon Baptiste with friends in this recording from 2020.

Photo: Fire Department, Columbus, Indiana. 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.