Fortune favors the bright.
A "Wheel of Fortune" contestant astounded viewers and host Pat Sajak Wednesday night by solving a three word puzzle in which the words had three letters, four letters and five letters.
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Emil de Leon only had the vague hint that he was guessing a "thing" that started with "NE." The board looked like this: NE_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"This looks tough to me. It's a thing," Sajak told him. "You're a really good problem solver but I don't know. You have 10 seconds. Keep talking, maybe the right thing will pop out. Good luck."
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De Leon correctly guessed "New baby buggy" with his first attempt — prompting Pat to playfully pat-down the player.
Vanna White, the studio audience and viewers at home could hardly believe his luck — and de Leon walked away with $45,000.
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"Tonight's 'Wheel of Fortune' features most amazing solve in my 30+ years on the show. No kidding," Sajak tweeted.
But was everyone mistaking exceptional verbal ability for a bolt of lightning?
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Some linguistically minded folks think that attributing de Leon's win to near-divine luck takes away from the contestant's quick thinking.
After all, with N and E on the board, the first word almost certainly had to be "New."
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As for the other words, cultural blogger Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post points out that the show's contestants get to see a used letter board and that de Leon's would have read, "ABC FG IJK PQ UVWXYZ" because he already guessed H, M, D and O.
And since Q, J, Z, X, V, K and W are essentially useless and appear in less than 1.5 percent of English words, de Leon needed to put together two words of four and five letters using A, B, C, F, G, I, P, U and Y.
Dewey said de Leon could only have 53 possible five-letter words and that most of them — like fizzy or puffy — are not things.
In short, there weren't exactly many other valid guesses he could have stumbled upon.
So the question remains whether the "Wheel of Fortune" guess heard around the world was an instance of unbelievable luck, or of a man who truly knows how to play the game.
mwalsh@nydailynews.com
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