Not my experience at all.
Ask me how I know what an EPEE is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosswordese
Really no harder than memorizing all the 2 and 3 letter words in Scrabble and many players will pick most up in a few months.
That’s when you’re like, only tangentially involved with the making of a movie or tv show, but too famous to go without a credit?
In particular, you have to consider the equilibrium. If you only allow a subset of words in Scrabble, this replaces the competitive advantage from knowing lots of words that no one uses in real life, with a competitive advantage from knowing the exact contours of the border between acceptable and unacceptable words. I would argue that this is even worse; at least if you learn lots of Scrabble words you're learning something about the real world.
By contrast, Wordle can self-impose whatever constraints they want on solutions, and people don't have to know what those constraints are in order to solve the puzzle. (It can help a little on the margin, which in a perfect world would not be the case, but it's much less of a problem for the puzzle-solving experience than the Scrabble equivalent would be.)
It's obviously an impossible challenge to draw those contours in language. Wordle did pretty well though! And going the other direction, just allowing everything that could possibly a word, just starts getting ridiculous.
During Covid I saw an ad for a fencing school how it was the best sport during Covid.
You wear a mask
You keep your distance
And if someone doesn't, you stick em with the pointy end
:)
But I disagree that that makes it for snobs. Snobbery is more about an attitude of looking down on others or their tastes, whereas knowing Latin or being a fan of opera is really just about exposure.
Sure, there exist some (too many) opera fans who would say something like "it's real art compared to pop or hip hop being low class trash", but that's not a defining part of liking opera and plenty of people who like opera aren't snobs. Ironically it's a different form of snobbery (sometimes called reverse snobbery though personally I hate that term), to dismiss anyone who learned Latin or who likes opera as being a snob!
With Wordle the limitation is only put on the words the game generates as answers. You can use obscure words to guess, they just won’t be the answer.
It's also just the regular French word that means "sword". But although crossword puzzles frequently ask you to know common French words, I've never seen one clue the answer EPEE that way.
Any outdoor sport would be better.
The Wordle list of legal guesses is not substantially curated; AFAIK basically all five-letter words legal in Scrabble are on it (except on offensiveness grounds, which was a highly controversial decision). If this were not the case, I predict you'd get user dissatisfaction as per above. Wordle's list of possible answers is much more curated, but that's my point; it can err on the side of conservatism, because users won't notice if a word that they'd expect to be on there is missing, whereas they will notice if such a word is not allowed as a guess.
That's not really the concept. People know what an orca is.
But if you see a crossword clue that says "black and white animal", you know that the answer is ORCA without even needing to look at the number of letters in the answer. (Could it be "skunk"? Could it be "panda"? No, those are stupid questions.) Same thing if the clue is "marine predator". (Could that be "shark"? No.) The words I listed are incredibly likely to appear in crossword puzzles. That's what's weird about them.
Don't forget sailing and equestrian.