Sideswipe: January 10: Keeping up with technology

A reader writes: “I forgot my headphones at my in-laws’ at Christmas. ‘We found them and have popped them in the post’, they texted.”

Spelling stuffs up Wordle

The Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is one that infuriated British players of Wordle who knew it only as the name of an old Greek poet — or Bart Simpson’s dad. The dictionary says ‘homer’ saw the biggest search spike of the year, with some 79,000 people looking up the informal American term for a home run during the week of May 5, when it was the Wordle answer, CNN reports.

The popularity of Wordle caused five-letter words to dominate search surges this year. The second-highest spike was searches for “humor” — which the Brits spell as “humour” — and “caulk”, which the dictionary says is more common in American English than British English. Other spikes were caused by Wordle answers “that were generally unfamiliar: ‘tacit’, ‘bayou’, ‘trope’, and ‘knoll’,” the dictionary said in a press release.

The dictionary said that before the rise of the word game, spikes in searches were generally caused by current affairs. Words “squeezed out” by searches for five-letter words this year included ‘oligarch’, ‘vulnerable’, and ‘ableist’. On May 5, Wordle players in Britain said they were furious about ‘homer’ ending their winning streaks.

Maybe keep these separate

Whenever I drive through Putāruru, I always wonder - why on Earth would anyone want to have a coffee that tastes like cheese?

A confession

”There’s a man in his late 50s who has been running past my house two to three times a week for over ten years. He has no idea I exist, but when I don’t see him for a few days, I worry about him.”