I'm going ananas

Today marks a month of the TongueTied Daily, a month I was sure would be full of “Polyglot today” triumph, but in which I only correctly unscrambled all six words half the time – and often with just seconds to spare. Which is humbling. Which is in turn good.

And there have been some enjoyable surprises along the way. I only learned last week, via TongueTied Daily #27, what an outlier English is when it comes to these: 🍍🍍🍍 Whereas the rest of Europe adopted an adaption ("ananas") of the Tupi-language name used in South America, from whence the fruit came, English speakers created a mash-up of what the thing looked like, a pinecone, and what it was, a fruit (using a Latin-derived metonym for fruit, the apple).

Insights like these are one of the pleasures the puzzle aims to deliver. I’ve also enjoyed discussions with friends about our results. Sometimes the shared scores feel like celebrations, other times confessions, best of all something more granular: why a person is testing themselves in the languages they are, or to what they attribute their score that day – slow fingers, distraction, pattern recognition, erudition, luck.

To open up these conversations to anyone and everyone who plays, we’re considering adding a comments section to the Daily. This would be just one of a dozen tweaks we’re tackling in August, from refining the stats page to offering ways of helping you turn puzzle results into working vocabulary. In other words, if you have any requests, now’s the time!