Today’s Wordle #396 Hint And Answer: Wednesday, July 20th

Welcome back to the most wonderful Wordle guides on the World Wide Web this Wednesday, Wordle Warriors!

Every now and then before we get started on the guide itself, I’ll ramble on about this or that—complain about the division in our country and culture and marvel at how something as simple as a word game can bring us together; or turn the entire intro into a poem; or talk about the etymology of this word or that.

And sometimes, when the fancy strikes, I’ll talk about some of the cool things that happened on this day in history. For instance, Wednesday, July 20th . . . .

• In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the surface of the moon.
• In 1944, German military leaders attempted—and failed—to assassinated Adolph Hitler in the July Plot. This was later made it into a pretty good Tom Cruise movie called Valkyrie (Operation Valkyrie was actually just one part of the larger plan).
• Today is also the birthday of musician Carlos Santana (1947), actress Natalie Wood (1938) and author Cormac McCarthy (1933).

Okay, let’s take a look at today’s Wordle now that we’ve gotten our history lesson out of the way!

Today’s Wordle #396 Hint & Answer

Naturally, there are spoilers ahead. A hint first and then the solution. You’ve been warned.

The Hint: When you say something blatantly obvious or obnoxiously inconsequential, you’re being [ ].

The Answer:

So my first guess—drake—essentially got the exact same correct letters in green that Wordle Bot’s precious crane would have gotten. Either guess would have been equally good, narrowing the remaining possible solutions down to just 30. You might think I came up with drake because of the rapper but I was actually thinking about dragons, which are sometimes referred to as drakes. To get the excellent early game Drake’s Sword in Dark Souls you have to shoot a dragon in the tail dozens and dozens of times.

From here, World Bot says I should have guessed pinto which is probably a good idea. It would have gotten me the ‘T’ green on guess #2. The problem is, I like to play ‘hard mode’ where you have to use the letters you’ve gotten so I went with prone. This slashed my choices to 10.

At this point, with the ‘A’ and ‘O’ out of the game, I wanted to think of something that included an ‘I’ and I simply thought of ‘T’ as the starting letter. I thought tripe at first but the ‘P’ was out of play. Trite was a natural second choice and turned out to be the right guess on #3, with fully 9 other words to choose from. I am the champion of the world!

The other remaining possible guesses were: bribe, crime, grime, tribe, trice, brute, creme, truce and write. I even beat Wordle Bot this time. The bot guessed in four: crane, pivot, tribe, trite. Ha! Take that!

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