Welcoming Wordle, and Rochester college students, at summer's end
The summer that’s winding down was notable for a lot of bad, even frightening things, but in Rochester, and everywhere else, one bit of comfort was Wordle, the addictive word game owned and run online by the New York Times.
Wordle gives you six guesses to discover a five-letter word. Each time you enter a word the game uses some color coding to tell you if any of its letters are in the secret word. Better yet, it reveals if those letters are in the right spot.
You might begin with “adieu” and, if you’re very lucky, guess your way to “write,” the right answer. Or not.
If you finished the Wordle at two in the morning, as does an insomniac friend of ours, you would immediately let the world know how well you did.
Certainly, the next morning you would compare notes with your Wordle buddies, blaming any Wordle defeats — they can happen — on the New York Times for not accepting slang or foreign words or place names, or...you get the point.
What might the historians say about our addiction to Wordle?
Perhaps they would put it in context. This summer there were deadly wildfires and record-setting heatwaves. A war raged on with no end in sight. Politics seemed even meaner than usual.
A game that only asks us to sort out some five-letter words, a game that praises us if we win and isn’t nasty if we lose, a game like that is a joy.
“Adieu” transforms into “write,” and, for just a moment, the world makes sense.
A college town
The cars are unpacked. The students have moved in. The parents, tearful, linger, wait for a last hug.
I watch all of this as I walk about Geneseo, where I live, where SUNY Geneseo is located.
Similar goodbyes are taking place, or have taken place, all over the Rochester area.
We forget sometimes that one of the main industries in Rochester — the main industry, really — is education. There are thousands of college students here, spread over nine campuses, some small, some large.
Once a company town — Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb — Rochester is college town and blessed to be so.
Students come to the city to study everything: Computer science, the humanities, packaging, imaging, nursing, and, well, they have all sorts of options.
One subject of study can be Rochester itself, given the city’s rich history, its notables and the impact it has had on the world. (Yes, the world. Think of film, of Xerography, of the leadership of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony.)
In a course I teach at the University of Rochester in the spring we explore and write about some of this and get to know Rochester, its ups and its downs.
The course plays to my interests, the fact that I’ve been putting together a list of Remarkable Rochesterians for the last 13 years, a labor of love that has introduced me to so many examples of human achievement.
We talk about the achievements, but we don’t ignore Rochester’s skeletons, the fact, for example, that the city’s namesake, Nathaniel Rochester owned and sold slaves.
We talk, too, about the decline of the industries, Kodak especially, that once made Rochester a different kind of company town.
The other side of this, the students note, is that Rochester is remarkably resilient. There’s music here; there’s art collectives. There’s the Public Market. There are parks and lakes. Not to be forgotten, there are garbage plates. (Yes, they always come up.)
I’d add the students themselves to any list of Rochester’s virtues. It’s good to have them back.
From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott, writes Remarkable Rochester, who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Welcoming Rochester college students, and Wordle, at summer’s end
