A dad took to social media to share his young son’s frustrations with a seemingly impossible word search.
In a post shared to Reddit, a user writing under the handle LegalRadish147, shared a screenshot of the Thanksgiving-themed puzzle. Writing alongside the image, he said: “My son (1st grade) wants to know who’s responsible, he wants his time back!”
Newsweek reached out to u/LegalRadish147 for comment. Though the poster gave permission for the puzzle to feature on the Newsweek website, he preferred not to comment on the story.
On first glance, the puzzle appears ordinary enough, but look closer and you might notice the understandable source of the father and son’s ire.
The benefits of word puzzles to the human brain are well documented. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found crossword puzzles were more effective at improving the memories of older adults with mild cognitive impairment than other digital brain games.
This particular puzzle is likely to have given the first-grade child at the heart of the story more of a headache than anything else, though.
That is largely down to the fact it is essentially impossible to complete. Despite suggesting 14 different Thanksgiving-orientated terms are hidden among the grid of letters, it would appear one is missing.
The word “bread” does not appear to feature at any point in the jumble of letters featured. That has evidently proven to be a source of some frustration for the Reddit user’s son, prompting his father to take to social media to share his mild annoyance at what has happened.
It turned out the poster wasn’t alone, with several fellow social media users taking to the comments section accompanying the post to share their anger at the incomplete word search.
“Twentysomething me is annoyed,” one user wrote. “And yet I think we all looked for it just in case,” another said. “50s and yes I looked,” a third commented.
Elsewhere, a fourth user wrote: “60s here, and I looked because sometimes on these puzzles the words will go like backward diagonally. Those particular ones were the bane of my existence as a left-handed child with dyslexia. Avoided those when I came across them as a teacher too.”
Meanwhile, one Reddit user thought the experience was a valuable lesson for the young child. “Your son is learning two valuable lessons. People make mistakes. Life is unfair,” they said.
However, another had a more devious theory as to why the word might be missing. “This was probably intentional. Keep kids busy for ages looking for something that’s not there,” they posted.
An educator even got in on the discussion to share their theory as to what happened. “Teacher assistant here,” they wrote. “It’s more likely that the teacher was using an online reference. Rushed worksheets so they can sell ‘lesson plans’ to teachers online. Unfortunately this is only going to get worse with AI. Coloring sheets are much worse for it but it’s definitely spreading everywhere.”
Whatever the truth might be, the discussion around the puzzle proved almost as interesting as the word search itself, though both ended without much in the way of a resolution.
