"What an Amazing Language"
The speaker: My mother, on the couch, sometime during the last 25-30 years, having an aha moment over a particularly clever piece of crossword misdirection.
My thought: Really? Is English really more amazing than other languages when it comes to ambiguity and wordplay? I just don't know.
Today in the Times: "Number of people" (48 Across, ten letters).
My thought: What an amazing language.
My thought: Really? Is English really more amazing than other languages when it comes to ambiguity and wordplay? I just don't know.
Today in the Times: "Number of people" (48 Across, ten letters).
My thought: What an amazing language.
posted by DO at 12:01 PM
11 Comments:
Nice.
Amazing, in the way you are noting, not because it is so sophisticated or mathematically perfect, but because it is such a crude hodgepodge -- excuse me, OLIO -- of puzzle-pieces crammed together where they actually don't match or fit -- with the accident that it all happened with the ingredient pieces being from languages already set down in the Latin alphabet with conflicting spelling conventions -- and no monarch or government set about standardizing everything. (Doesn't England even use the metric system now?) Which is to say that, myself, I wouldn't have used the word "amazing" for this. Makes for lots of fun, though, which you might possibly have more of if you google my name, due to a silly coincidence.
Because things have been just amazing for you since your engagement in January of 1993 to Gerald Weiss?
Yes. Sorry to rub your nose in it and otherwise rain on your rapture.
ATTENDANCE is what I thought of immediately, but don't write it in just yet.
That's good, but they're looking for an answer that requires more lateral thinking. You have to disengage the clutch in your mind in order to get it.
That's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
(Not you, thane.)
My clutch metaphor? Or something else?
I'm just a little sensitive about dis-engagement at this point, sorry.
Many classic forms of crossword-cluing trickery have been so overused that they have skewed the verbal sensibility of regualr solvers. When I see the word "Nice," my first thought is always the city on the Riviera, not a aynonym for pleasant. Likewise, "flower" is a river before a plant and "It's spotted..." is interpreted as "It has spots" before "It's seen."
"Number" falls into that category for me as well. My initial instinct is always anesthetic, and if that doesn't work, I try counting unit. Any other workhorse tricky-clue conventions that regular solvers are no longer fooled by?
Tons, but the first that comes to mind is that "character" typically means "letter" rather than "person" (e.g. "Character in the Odyssey?" = some Greek letter).
That's a great question, tmcay. I used to only be able to think of aerodynamics when I saw "spoiler," but now I'm more apt to think of the guy that blows the ending for other people.
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