NYT Spelling Bee drives me crazy

Sorry! Thanks for fixing it.

Rubaiyat would be a pangram today. Omar Khayyam would be pleased.

I was pretty surprised Sam the foodie declined to include the spicy red sauce the letters would have allowed, for 9 points.

I give up.

Ditto.

Not accepting YTTRIA, which I suppose is understandable.

I always try this one. One day he will surprise me.

Which one?

The spicy sauce

I don’t know what it is either

Oh, sorry.

Arrabbiata. Presumably excluded because of its root in “Arabia”. Also, I think it’s 10 points.

Thanks!

I tried it and was disappointed. And the word, surprisingly, means “angry”:

Arrabbiata literally means ‘angry’ in Italian; in Romanesco dialect the adjective arabbiato denotes a characteristic (in this case spiciness) pushed to excess. In Rome, in fact, any food cooked in a pan with a lot of oil, garlic, and peperoncino so as to provoke a strong thirst is called “arrabbiato” (e.g. broccoli arrabbiati)

yep, 10, which I could have really used. just bad counting, not an attempt to obscure the right answer

Now do puttanesca

Lol, puttanesca is one of my favorites! I first ate it at a restaurant in Little Italy in the Bronx, NYC. The menu explained the possible name origins.

I wonder whether it will ever appear in the Bee?

Well eight different letters one of which is an S…

I’d rather he include arrabbiata than “arancino”, which I almost never see in the wild. Arrabbiata is featured in several NYT recipes and seems to be trending.

Tough one for me today. I got to genius, but the pangram eluded me. I hate it when that happens.

It does contain a word that uses the six outer letters, but not the central one … something I call a pain-gram. It’s a six letter word too, so a perfect pain-gram: ALMOND

I just went back to give it one more try and got it instantly. Weird how that works sometimes.

I call those a donut pangram. And I did spot the perfect one you did.

Ooh, that’s a good one!