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Solving REMUPI

In a word unscrambler app last night, we ran into a set of letters where we had a strange mental block and could not see the obvious answer.  The letters were REMUPI, which is pretty funny to say.  Sometimes we just try goofy words because they are amusing.  Then we saw U-PRIME.  Still not a word, but PRIME is a good sub-puzzle.  PRIME, PRIM, PIE, PIER, RIM, RIME, RIP, REP ... it's good to do these in groups, then pick the next group to run through.  There's not much that could be done with the U though, certainly nothing came to mind about adding a U to PRIME in any sensible way.  EMU, RUMP, but it was still a dead end.

After staring at it and shuffling letters and still not seeing anything, it turned out to be UMPIRE.  What's funny is how neither of us give a hoot about sports.  Maybe if we were big baseball fans we would have seen UMPIRE right away?  Oddly, the same app rejected UMP.

Also, IMPURE, which was elusive because we're used to going through common start and finish groupings.  We had PURE early on, but it took much longer to think of IM- as anything useful.

On the funny side, a few days later I got a puzzle which boiled down to UMMPIRE with the extra M.  Which unscrambles into PREMIUM.

Just some pondering over patterns.

 


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