Fill Me In #328: 85% quality content; 15% pants.

This week, Ryan is in Hawaii so Brian is joined by Ben "The Barnacle" Zimmer! It's a super-sized episode jam-packed with Word of the Year reflections, New York Times crosswords in the Thunder Round, a little behind-the-scenes at Daily Crossword Links, Wordle (the wildest new word puzzle craze), and an assortment of nonsense including knitting, darning, and a soupçon of meat references. Find more of Ben Zimmer on Twitter and on his other podcast, Spectacular Vernacular. There's a new contest crossword, which you can download at https://bit.ly/fmi328con Stuff to click: Daily Crossword Links American Dialect Society's Word of the Year announcement Jeff Davidson's Crosswordle #1 The New York Times's article about Wordle The New York Times Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship Boswords, and the upcoming Winter Wondersolve The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament Cracking the Cryptic's take on Wordle The Wordle game itself, in case you haven't found it yet Damon Gulczynski's blog, Joe Pancake The bagel video Brian talked about If you get bored, write something for the Fill Me In wiki. And if you're feeling philanthropic, donate to our Patreon. We shout out the names of our patrons on the first new episode of each month -- including today! Do you enjoy our show? Actually, it doesn't matter! Please consider leaving us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. This will help new listeners find our show, and you'll be inducted into the Quintuple Decker Turkey Club. Drop us a note or a Tweet or a postcard or a phone call — we'd love to hear from you. Helpful links: Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fill-me-in/id1364379980 Google Play link: https://player.fm/series/fill-me-in-2151002 Amazon/Audible link: https://www.amazon.com/item_name/dp/B08JJRM927 RSS feed: http://bemoresmarter.libsyn.com/rss Contact us: Email ([email protected]) / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Google Voice (315-510-9892) We're putting these words here to help with search engine optimization. We don't think it will work, but you probably haven't read this far, so it doesn't matter: baseball, crossword, crosswords, etymology, game, hunt, movies, musicals, mystery, oscar, pizza, puzzle, puzzles, soup, trivia, words