I am salty about a particular room in Lingo, the room where the clues are CAT and ROOSTER. So I wrote this "helpful" "FAQ" to explain it! Expanding the answers will give spoilers, to this particular room, which I think deserves to be spoiled.
Q: What is the theme of this room?
A: Like many rooms in Lingo, the answers form a meaningful set. For example, you might hypothetically be looking for answers that are all prepositions, or all palindromes, or all types of beverages. In this case, the theme is "purplecaws".
Q: Wait, what are those?
A: Purplecaws are a set of English words that have the property that they are either spelled PURPLE or CAW.
Q: Can you give some examples?
A: Examples include "PURPLE" and "CAW".
Q: Could you use it in a sentence?
A: In the words of the great poet Ogden Nash: "I never saw a purplecaw, I never hope to see one"— oh that's not what he wrote? Well, anyway.
Q: Why isn't the answer [some other word]?
A: Because that word isn't a purplecaw.
Q: How am I expected to solve the room?
A: First, you use what you've learned about magenta cubes to infer the hidden intermediate answer on the right, then use that to get to a three-letter answer, which is reasonably constrained to be CAW.
The other puzzle, with a magenta and blue cube, has too many possible answers. But now you've seen all but one answer in the room, so you should be thinking about the theme. Once you realize that the room is about purplecaws, you will be able to constrain the remaining answer to be PURPLE.
Q: Is there another path to solving the room?
A: Well, you could try guessing all of the hundreds of possible answers to the left puzzle. Guessing can be a good way to overcome your ignorance if you don't have the needed background knowledge, such as if you didn't know about purplecaws.
You could also look around for inspiration. For example, you could go elsewhere and find yourself thinking "I sure wish this purple door would open", causing you to consider typing the word PURPLE into a cube very far away from it, though that wouldn't explain CAW. But maybe you would also find yourself thinking "I sure wish this [crow noise] door would open".
Q: What a strange room. At least it wasn't strictly required to make progress, right?
Hahahahahaha hahahahaha haha hahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahaha oh it certainly was.
