Reverse rainbow!
BARM is what led me to purple first. It’s obscure enough that I guessed there had to be something about the word itself and not its meaning. So I took away the B and had the “a-ha!” moment.
(I actually spotted yellow first, but it seemed too obvious to pull the trigger, so I saved those for last.)
I assumed it was the American spelling of Balm.
I would never have gotten Blue. It was the last one left and I finally had to reveal it.
Huh. I’m a homebrewer and never came across that word. Looking it up, seems surprising I’ve never seen or noticed it. At any rate, that really gave up the category pretty quickly. Another purple first thanks to it. Words like that are so conspicuous the first thing to do is add or subtract a letter or letters.
I didn’t get it first but that plus RANKLE both didn’t seem to fit and then I found the connection. It would have been more difficult had they used ALARM instead.
Today’s kicked my butt.
I mean, if they wanted to keep the category as-is and consistent, they could have gone HARM or WARM. Why choose such a conspicuous word if you’re not just gifting us a purple.
But the category was 'Body part plus a starting letter. (my bold) Just one letter, not two.
Do you also use the stuff for other things like baking? That, plus I’m a medievalist, so I collect words like barm and gruit as I do my research.
I’ve used spent grains for breads/crispbreads, that sort of thing, but I’ve never reused the yeast or anything like that. Come to think of it, I don’t know why it’s never occured to me to do so, but I’ve never tried messing with brewing strains with baking.
I might have failed on my own today, but I’ll never know. Wednesday mornings are my work team’s weekly meeting, and our supervisor often has the team do that day’s Connections. I might have concluded that BARM was an obvious purple word, but I only had a minute or so to work before she guided us all through the last 2½ categories because the whole puzzle was a PITA today.
I nearly failed today. I had three wrong guesses. I think I was falling for the red herring.
I got the purple right away (because it’s something I’m familiar with) then yellow, green, blue, no mistakes.
I guessed the wrong category for Purple, but I got them with no errors. G-B-Y-P
I got purple second because of a similar familiarity
Purple was last, but at least I correctly guessed the category before I submitted.
Add one more purple aficionado. I’ve got that stuff in my basement game room, although it hasn’t seen use in decades.
I started with BLOCKS, FOILS, STOPS, MASKS but after that it was smooth sailing although I had no clue what Purple was at the end.
Nailed it today. Not sure I understand the significance of the colors.
Like yellow, green, blue, purple? That’s order of difficulty. (Supposedly. I’ve had a number of puzzles where I really thought the blue was clearly harder than the purple, adjusting for my knowledge and other people’s knowledge as best I could. Often a fill-in-the-blank category will be purple, though there is the occasional blue, I think. Anything involving taking or adding a letter or letters is usually purple. Any of those gimmick clues will tend to be that category and, if not, blue.) It even keeps track of how many “purple firsts” you’ve done. Or is there something in today’s puzzle about colors? (I haven’t looked yet.)