April 1st

Maybe I am just an old curmudgeon now, but let me tell you: in the age of the Internet, April Fools Day sucks. And it has for some time.

People do not understand what a proper April Fool joke is. And the spew of nonsense on any one of my social media feeds is heaping up the evidence of that.

Not to mention: the Wordle-style games are not all resisting the impulse to pile on. One of them - with two parallel puzzles - had one of its answers, "hapax." That's not a word, say you? You are very nearly correct. But, alas, not completely so. Wiktionary tells us it's a short form of hapax legomenon, a linguistics term meaning, "a word occurring only once in a given corpus."

Those of us enjoying a winning streak at games like this did not appreciate the journey into loanwords from ancient Greek used only in abstruse discourses on linguistics. It was quite a prank, indeed. Oh yeah, that was the other word. Prank.

Phooey on the whole thing.