A few days ago, I asked a few LiveJournal acquaintances if they had any favourite time-wasting websites that they might turn to when the going got tough, or actually not even that tough, just a bit boring. The kind of website you run to like a comfort blanket when everything isn’t 100% lovely, i.e. all the time. One kind soul posted the enigmatic comment “Weboggle is like crack” – but with no URL, and no further explanation. I found the URL. And, surprise surprise, it’s like crack.

Based entirely on the popular word game Boggle – “please don’t sue”, it says on the “about” page – you can opt for a 4×4 or 5×5 board, and spend three minutes competing with people across the globe in finding as many words as possible made out of consecutive letters thereon. I like to think of myself as reasonably au fait with the English language, but despite playing dozens upon dozens of games, I can’t get anywhere near the top half of the scoring table. Last night there were 200 or more people playing the 4×4 game, and I never did any better than about 130th. I was making scores of 25, maybe 30, while people like “lankywass”, “artsucks” and “anniegirl” were regularly getting into the high fifties. Oh, the shame.

During this game:

I came 62nd out of 87. Having played before, I know that their dictionary is pretty forgiving, so I spent several valuable seconds typing in stuff like “yea” and “rad” and, uh, “dep”. As usual, I amassed a score of around 20-odd, thinking I had scoured the board pretty thoroughly, at which point my dismal ranking was revealed, along with all the words I’d failed to find:

Payed? Sieur? Uraei? You mean to tell me that 61 people above me were coming up with stuff like this? Have I unwittingly stumbled on a corner of the internet where massively-brained eggheads try and make each other looking stupid by ramming words like “lipide” down each other’s throats? This certainly came as little consolence:

None of us got duads, then, phew. Thing is, my utter failure to shine at this deceptively simple word game is one of the things that makes it so bloody addictive. I’ve often wondered whether people have successfully set up parental filters on their own machines, to block THEMSELVES out of certain websites. Porn addicts, adding URL after URL to the filter, assigning a random password and then attempting to forget said password in an attempt to wean themselves off, you know, that kind of thing. Anyway, Weboggle’s a candidate for the filter. It’s a menace to society – if not your vocabulary.

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Good to see the Caroline Phillips article in Tuesday’s Evening Standard seems to be finally making its way around the world, despite the Standard’s policy of, er, not having a website where they archive all their content. Some anonymous saint has reposted the whole thing, with transcription spelling errors intact, at mytornadohell – although it’s telling that a number of people responding to the thread are oblivious to the unintended hilarity lurking withing the horror. Still, they’ll come round, I’m sure.