Somehow I remembered them or knew to try a variant based on something similar.
They’re in M-W’s dictionary, so that qualifies them as English words as far as I’m concerned. At any rate, I got them because I remembered them from previous times they showed up.
No FENNEC today, yet again
Today I achieved Queen Bee status after remembering nacelle from Star Trek shows.
Why wouldn’t they take HOLOCENE, the geologic epoch we’re all living in right now?
Capitalization.
Are you saying they don’t accept that word because it’s a proper noun? You may be right. I just checked, and they haven’t taken a number of other similar geological eras.
Yes. It’s capitalized in M-W.
Natural QB today. I don’t know often try to go past Genius, but it was a relatively smaller puzzle today.
NQB here too. Reading the last of words is funny with all of the different ways to pronounce the same or similar letter groups.
I have no idea how people learn to pronounce English as a second language. “Through”, you know, rhymes with “queue”, whereas “though” rhymes with “bow”, no, not that “bow”, the other “bow”, like “bough”, which, of course, doesn’t rhyme with “rough” at all.
Bairn is a perfectly cromulent word and should be accepted.
I tried it, too. 
I’m having such a hard time with today’s Bee.
Me, too. Not exactly zooming through it.
Ditto. Although I finally got a pangram, but still not at Genius.
Noticed BIRDMAN which would have been a perfect pangram if accepted.
BTW, anyone else notice they aren’t going for further badges for First Pangram. I got the one at 200, but there’s no target for any more. Not that that keeps me from trying for a pangram at the beginning of every game. But I was doing that before the badges were instituted. There’s also no target for Genius after 1000. Are they trying to get rid of these?
ETA: as soon as I finish this post, I go back and find another word that gets me to Genius.
What, there’s no badges for pangram first after 200? Thanks @dtilque for telling us, since I’ve been trying to find the pangramfor 15 minutes. I have 20 other words written down but not entered yet since I was working on pangram first. But if there’s no badge for it…
I earned my 200th pangram first yesterday.
They still must keep count and there may be a future extension
Looks like it. Click on Stats and you’ll get three of the badges. One of mine is First Pangram. If I click on that, it shows more detail, including some arrows for previous and next badge with that title. But the one for next badge is disabled, which I assume means there’s no further badges for First Pangram. I could be wrong here, but in the past those future badges were not disabled.
The same for the Genius badge, although I have not reached 1000, nor has anyone else. They’ve only kept info used for badges for 991 games, so no one’s gotten 1000 yet.
A few weeks ago, I received a badge for finding my 650th long word (ten or more letters) and then there’s another one at 800 long words. Some days, there are no words long enough and other days there are more than one so this badge takes a while to achieve.