The Daily Feather — All in a Name

At a Figma Config conference, Josh Wardle recalled: “This is true: I was going to call Wordle, Mr. Bugs’ Wordy Nugz. Had I called the game Mr. Bugs, I like to think it would not have been successful.” The Welsh software engineer’s inspiration derived from the mechanics of the color-matching game Mastermind. In its original 2013 rendition, the game included all 13,000 five-letter words in the English language. But Wardle’s partner became entangled in the verbality’s obscurity prompting a pruning of the list to the most familiar 2,000, which whittled down still requires five years to solve a puzzle a day. By the time of the 2014 prototype’s premier, Wardle had lost interest. The same cannot be said for his relatives, who were instant addicts upon becoming indoctrinated in 2021. Soon enough, Wordle, with an ‘o,’ went viral, with its player base catapulting from just 90 players in November 2021 to more than 300,000 by New Year’s 2022. On January 31, 2022, the New York Times Company acquired Wordle for an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures.

‘CFNAI’ is not a Wordle’s word (we checked). Perhaps that’s for the best given the Chicago Fed National Activity Index’s induced a collective yawn in its pole position at the opening of a busy data docket week. At -0.3, January’s print was close enough to the consensus forecast of -0.5. Even the revision to 0.18 from December’s initially reported 0.15 was underwhelming. We wish there were news in the CFNAI’s diffusion index arresting what had been an unbroken 22-month string of negative readings -- to 0.1 -- for the first time since October 2022 (orange line). To feign a market-worthy headline, we’d have to bow to the combination of a weak technical (last October dropped out of the calculation) and December’s “robust” showing eliciting the barely discernible pulse.