THEMELESS MONDAY: [ ACROSS LITE][ PDF]
PROGRAMS: [Across Lite] [Adobe Reader]
It’s a snow day in Boston. Somebody must have read the forecast that speculated we were going to get 6-10 inches overnight and couldn’t be bothered to, you know, wake up at 4:00 in the morning and make the decision to cancel school then. Blame it on the Super Bowl, I guess. So, anyway, they went ahead and cancelled it at like before Halftime. And, well, Mother Nature has a wicked sense of humor. For we got exactly zero inches, and yet, it’s a snow day. Good times. Good times.
Speaking of good times, there was an, erm, interesting article in the Times recently that underscores a big problem I have with big data. Anyway, the article is called What 74 Years of Times Crosswords Say About the Words We Use. In the article, Charles Kurzman crunches loads of data about what foreign language words were once deemed acceptible in crosswords and how they tapered off in the Shortz era. It’s impressive, I guess, if you like looking at car wrecks. And those do need to be studied, I suppose. But facts are stubborn things. We can pore over all the data in the world, but if you overlook one important point, it’s all meaningless. The reason older crosswords used bullshit like Hippolyte TAINE and esotery is that, well, editorial rules weren’t as rigid as they are nowadays. The whole New Wave basically said crosswords should reflect modern day language instead of an “anything in the unabridged dictionary is fair game approach.” Throw in more multi-word phrases, slang, brand names, and you’ve got a more modern and colorful puzzle. Why in God’s earth would we clue MIT as {German for with} instead of tapping into the much more interesting history of the vaunted Cambridge institute? But still, it is worth a quick read if only to remember how we got here.
Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday.
Comments (9)