I lead an impoverished life as I think you may have figured out by now, and one of my impoverishments is an addiction to my daily Crossword Puzzle app. I do the puzzle daily--religiously as it were-- and then quite often read a blog that talks about it.* It’s written by a sometimes quite comical but most times exceedingly fussy chap. He’s a fast solver, you see. Not the fastest I’ve seen but waaayyyy faster than me. I take 7 minutes at least on Monday, usually more like ten or so if my attention wanders, as it is often wont to do. He takes less than 2. On Saturday, the hardest day, I take upwards of 45 minutes. He suggests a typical Saturday solve for him is around 4 minutes. Sunday is not always the hardest puzzle of the week but it’s time consuming to get through all those clues, so I rarely take less than an hour. He probably does it in less than ten minutes.
I’m not in it for the speed. But I like a good solve and I wish I could go to this blog and share the experience. He says he blogs because it’s a solitary activity and this is a way to feel communal around it. What almost invariably happens is I go to share in the joy for a puzzle I've loved and he trashes it. Usually it’s because it has things in it he doesn’t know, and for an English professor there’s a hell of a lot he doesn’t know. While he cheers clues and answers that commemorate contemporary ephemera, he has a disdain for historic and pop culture references earlier than 1980 (gee I wonder why) and goes off on puzzles that have more than one or two of them. While I complain about him just because being annoyed by him on a regular basis is a solitary activity and this is a way to feel communal around it, an example of what I'm talking about was a Friday puzzle that memorably kicked my ass from here to Timbuktu. Friday’s the second hardest day for the puzzle. I wasn’t annoyed-- I never am by my own ignorance and I also grant constructors a great deal of leeway out of gratitude for their work (the blogger is himself a constructor so feels entitled to critique his comrades’ output with vigor; his readership though is generally not, yet they also pile on with glee each day) but it was a very hard earned solve and probably my worst Friday ever. So I go to the blog at least expecting to see it graded as challenging and to get at least some validation for my perception of it as a bear and not only has he graded it Easy but he says it was one of his fastest Fridays ever.
The crossword puzzle that I struggled with another day was a particular pain in the butt. I technically didn’t finish it the night it appeared because of 2 crosses where I really didn’t know either answer. They were:
- Unit of a newspaper (I had vOL when the answer was COL—I mean my answer fit) crossed with Classic Camaros (I had IROvS when the answer was IROCS—I didn’t have a clue)
- Old TV Screens (C?TS was all I had when the answer was CRTS) crossed with Logger’s Contest (?OLEO versus ROLEO) Again, neither one of those meant a thing to me.
The whole puzzle just struck me as weird. I can’t be more specific than that, because as I look it over now for examples of what I’m talking about, even though it’s full of outlying clues and answers, none hit me quite the way it was hitting me as the memory of all but solving it the prior evening came to me in my stupor that morning when the cat woke me up by jumping from the window sill onto my gut with his claws extended. The way it hit me that morning was weird in the way I've previously often thought about, like some families are weird because the parents kiss the kids on the lips to say goodnight and have bizarre family expressions like “don’t get all wee-wee’ed up” and exotic customs like putting salt on their watermelon and what not. I mean every family is weird in its own way but some families it occurred to me are just freaks! And I was thinking the constructor had come from such a family and had composed his puzzle with his-family-isms as though his family’s ways were normal. And the thought I really wanted to share with you was that I was sure his family was from money, and as I had concocted this image of him and his wealthy parents and siblings sitting around the breakfast table salting their watermelon before driving their IROCs to the Roleo Invitational, a startling insight hit me, which was that there are certain things that some wealthy families of my acquaintance appear (to my pinko peasant heart) to have in common with cartoon hillbilly families: insularity; bizarre customs; incest; hostility to strangers; arrogance. It sounds weird and probably wrong now but believe me it was brilliant that morning.
Reading the blog and commentary on the puzzle gave me a severe case of Anthrophobia. People were fine with the 2 mystery spaces that stopped me dead in my tracks but were extremely worked up by a totally different and innocuous clue and answer in particular: the clue was “Hey there, Tiger!” and the answer was “ROWR” Not ideal in the scheme of things but perfectly legitimate, am I right? The curmudgeonly blogger set off the argument by insisting that fake lion sound is RaWR not ROWR. But, to paraphrase Joe Biden, come on, man! Rawr and Rowr are 2 different things! One is a lol catty spelling of the sound a monster makes, and the other is a phonetic rendering of a sexy growl a la Roy Orbison. Am I right?! But the comments were full of people chiming in in agreement (in a volume reminiscent in its overwhelming pointlessness of the excessive vote in California for Hillary Clinton in 2016) that Rowr is the wrong spelling of Rawr.
These were probably the same people who in a similar kerfuffle earlier in the week didn’t hear any distinction at all between DOH and DUH. There was no disagreement that there were 2 spellings; just no acknowledgement that they had different meanings-- the former the vocal head slapping verbally betraying the moment you realize you're wrong; the latter a shorthand for 'here is stupidity' whether your own or someone else's or a synonym for "No shit, Sherlock!" It’s not just caring about trivialities while being sloppy with important details that make people conventional to an irritating degree mind you, it’s just the way they do it, what they volunteer to reveal about themselves to strangers in public probably by accident most of the time (such as when they rush to be wrong about something that plenty of people have already been wrong about as though their impulse to chime in will influence reality to change its mind). It would be almost disturbing if it weren't so pathetic and sad. By talking about this I'm guilty of what I’m accusing these folks of, I admit, but I never exclude myself from my general disappointment in humanity.
And that is what I love about doing crossword puzzles.
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* Sometimes I go to the blog just to lurk around the latest battle in the comments around the question of whether the proper attitude toward language should be one of prescription (e.g., One mustn't end a sentence with a preposition!) or description (Like it or not, language belongs to all of us and most of us don't give a damn about that with which a sentence should end!). An army of fussbudgets is ever at the ready to defend the right to feel superior to less persnickety speakers of the tongue. I feel the descriptive side is more than adequately represented in these discussions by the fierce, brilliant, provocative and entertaining contributions of a West Virginia teacher with a background in linguistics. Respect!
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