Is the “D.” part of the name (which would confuse me), or is it part of some indicator for the puzzle it was part of? I don’t know a “D. Clarabell”.
I think the “D.” means that this was the fourth word in the puzzle (preceded by “A.”, “B.”, and “C.”). Using Bill’s “geezer” classification as a (big) hint, the answer is probably “clown“. Since “Howdy Doody” went off the air before I was born, this is definitely a “geezer” clue.
I knew the answer through general cultural osmosis, but I would definitely classify this one as geezer. I was surprised to learn that Howdy Doody ran until 1960 and there are a fair number of references from later years, but you’d pretty much have to be in your late 60s to have regularly watched it.
Or you could have read ‘It’ by S. King: he was the archetype of clowns before Ronald McDonald.
I thought Clarabell was a cow (a dairy company logo, perhaps?), so other than ‘dairy’, I’d no idea. Never saw H-D.
@Andrea: Clarabelle Cow is a Disney character (often seen with Horace Horsecollar).
I knew the Howdy Doody reference, but my first thought was “cow.” “Cow” obviously not fitting the space, brain had to engage the Memory Search function.
And why I’d’ve known that . . . ?? Have never seen either.
The idea of Clarabell being a geezer reference is like Lucille Ball being a geezer reference. Some things don’t need to be witnessed in person to be known.
And what is the Welsh word going down and crossing this one on the W? (jk)
D is for Down
Goodbye kids
Bill: we’ve started doing a lot of crosswords lately; it would seem to me that one of the prerequisites to doing crosswords is to be a geezer, because half of the clues are geezer clues. Anytime there is a “slang” type clue (“as the young kids might say”), it’s invariably something from the 1940s or earlier (naturally I can’t remember a single damn instance now — something like “hootch”, or “cool”). Another thing we’ve noticed is that almost every damn puzzle has “epeé” as an answer — is that like some kind of in-joke, or are crossword authors just that lazy?
@ larK – Words like “epee” (or “anoa”, or “ara”) get worked into crossword puzzles more often than they should because they have a convenient abundance of vowels. You should be happy that you don’t have to deal with German puzzles, in which the clues have become so repetitive that you can buy a dictionary of standard clues, with the solution for each. Further oddities: German puzzles are normally rectangular (not square), and have none of the symmetry that has become “standard” in American puzzles, especially since there is usually a bite taken out of one corner, in which the solution for the previous day is placed. Letter boxes are much larger, because the word separation boxes are used to place the clues for the next word.
You think that’s a geezer reference? I just had crossword reference Napoleon! Now that’s old.
” is that like some kind of in-joke, or are crossword authors just that lazy?”
Um, how hard do you work at creating your puzzles?
Actually it’s the obsession with OREOs that bemuses me. I think that’s both an in joke and a convenientuse of vowels. The weirdest clue for OREO I’ve seen was “Some people eat them with mustard” which must clearly have been a deliberate in joke.
@IarK and @Kilby – don’t forget “Koko’s weapon” – “snee” and “Japanese sash” – “obi”. I’d see those so many times my hand didn’t even need to pause filling them in.
Yes, many crossword puzzles are written with geezer clues. All sorts of names from the Thin Man movies, for instance. Recently, one NYT puzzle used modern slang and got in trouble for it because in the past few years its meaning changed to become its own antonym.
My favorite clue for “oreo” was “crossword puzzle cookie”. That was in the Washington Post puzzle.
Back to HD – I never watched that show as a kid, but I knew the answer. My girlfriend in college did, and we went to see a HD revival tour in Boston in 1971 or so.
FWIW, the show ran in reruns until the early 1970s.
But should it be cow rather than clown,
ANGUS
BISON
BOSSY
6 letters: cattle, bovine, Bessie, moo-moo
woozy: I do not accept that cop-out of if I don’t do x then I have no right to complain about someone else’s execution of x. What I do do, I do well, and I take pride in my work; if I were to make a crossword puzzle, or even make a career out of making crossword puzzles, I would do that well. If I am to the point where I am such a hack that I just constantly reuse tired, bad clues because of their convenience for me, then I should either quit, or at least try to camouflage my indifference to my work by at least acknowledging what I am doing — I think I have seen the “crossword puzzle cookie” clue for Oreo before, and as long as it’s not overdone, it’s a clever acknowledgement (and I suppose if you really, really overdo it, it becomes a kind of joke in a different way…) Which is why I asked if it’s maybe an in-joke — the hack could grab on to that as a life-line.
(And anyway, we are in a site that is all about discussing comics: would you insist that all of us have a published comic strip before we are allowed to comment?)
There is now a database of crossword clues and answers. I think some constructors are trying very hard not to reuse any clue that’s ever been used before. So, Clarabell for CLOWN is not so much a nod to geezers as it is a desire for novelty.
OTOH, I see in that database that in 2003, CrosSynergy clued CLOWN as ‘Clarabell on “Howdy Doody”‘. But as of the current database, it had not been used again in any of the dozen-plus puzzles they collect clues from.
Okay, then … they *don’t* use epee every puzzle. Just one out of 7 puzzles or so use it. And it’s not as common as other words and its a valid strategy to use common words to use letters. The alternative would be to use *original* words with unusual letter combinations. But those would be too obscure and to difficult and *un*fair.
To put this comic strip complaint this is like complaining why do comic strips always convey passage of time through separate panels. That’s an idea nearly 200 years old and no one has come up with anything more original? Are cartoonists that lazy or are readers so inured to unoriginality they expect i?
That’s not a valid complaint to me mind. It’s a failure to recognize the practicality of conventions that are virtues and completely misses the point.
I’ve been doing a lot of crossword puzzles recently too. They also have a lot of Bible references, including obscure ones like “Bible guy with a talking ass” (Balaam). Are those geezer clues too? because who born after 1970 grew up reading the Bible? But on the whole, you have to be a very old geezer. One clue was “Author of Romola”. The answer was “Eliot”, George Eliot of course. We all know Silas Marner and Mill on the Floss but who remembers Romola? There are also plenty of current movie actors and sports figures in the puzzles.
My mom and I do at least one crossword a week – the weekly in the SF Chronicle. Yes, there are a _lot_ of reused clues, though it goes in cycles – we got NENE (Hawaiian goose) a couple weeks ago after not seeing it for years, and it used to be in about every other puzzle.
We can do old sports and actors (male and female), but the modern stuff we both draw blanks on more often than not. You need to know what teams belong to what cities in many and various sports…we usually get most of the letters by crossing and come up with the answer somehow (from Oh yeah! to a complete guess – “this makes a word…”). The worst are when one (pop-culture) name crosses another; we’ll give up and look it up if we stall out long enough.
Oh yeah – and the only thing Clarabelle meant to me was cow. Not something I’ve picked up by osmosis, and I’ve never seen any Howdy Doody (and I don’t watch/read horror, so I didn’t get the King version either).
“The worst are when one (pop-culture) name crosses another”
I’m not sure who said it, but, one of the rules of modern crossword construction is, “Never cross an unknowable with an ungettable.”
Acrostics are not crosswords at all, but they are clued A., B., C., so D. Clarabell (5) would be CLOWN and should actually be clued “Clarabell, for example.” The cow was spelled Clarabelle, btw.
Obligatory clues:
All puzzles are syndicated. The better ones sometimes include a few clever clues indicated by a question mark at the end. This indicates “not a straight clue” or “use lateral thinking” or “another part of speech for one of the words in here”. Like
Layer (3)…HEN
The next one depends on the spelling of the name, to mislead you.
Refrain from MacDonald’s (5)…EIEIO
Extra minute (7)…TEENIER
Some sad streaming contents (5)…TEARS
Interestingly, when I put Clarabelle into google, Clarabelle Cow comes up first thing.
I’d never heard “Some crossword puzzle writers overuse ‘Oreo'” before this afternoon.
So of course doing a crossword puzzle just now just now, I encountered “Cookie that crossword puzzle fans are tired of.”
“when I put Clarabelle into google, Clarabelle Cow comes up first thing.”
What happens when you put Clarabell into Google?
Woops – spelt correctly (well, as the original clue, which I’d completely forgotten about), the clown comes up first.
Much as I love words, I loathe crossword puzzles. My mind just doesn’t work that way, I guess.
“Cookie that crossword puzzle fans are tired of.”
The database show 3331 *different* clues for OREO, a couple of them used over 100 times each.
I think Dollarbill is getting at two different things at once. Yes, there is a difference between “crossword” layout and “acrostic” layout (or back in the day we also had “double-crostic”), and beyond layout there are some differences in the game.
But that is not the same thing as the style of clues, with Dollarbill’s “TEARS” providing a nice example of the “cryptic” clue.
Sometimes a crossword feature is positioned as “Our weekly cryptic crossword” or whatever like that, and the point is that all or most of the clues will be in the cryptic clue style, maybe with some admixture of jokey or punning ones, like Dollarbill’s “TEENIER”. Also, sometimes in U.S. publications you will see something called “British style crossword” — that seems to mean some mixture of cryptic clues and standard definitional / synonym / identification clues. (Also, those “British style” crosswords tend to use shorter, more condensed or disguised cryptic clues, whereas American “cryptic crosswords” are very, not to say flat-footed, but diligent about the conventions of cryptic cluing.)
The essence of a cryptic clue is that the light (that is: the answer, the letters that are to be entered into the diagram) is indicated in TWO WAYS in the clue: once as meaning (by definition / synonym / allusion), and again in some other route, such as anagram, or hidden in the overlapping of letters in adjacent words of the clue, or in pun, etc. Plus, there tends to be some indicator of which type of disguised secondary clue is being used — thus, “disturbed” or “crazy” or (all too obviously) “scrambled” will point to anagramming, while a simple “in” may indicate hidden sequence of letters. Of course, it’s pleasingly skillful if these pointers are there for another purpose in the text of the clue, for instance if eggs are significant then a “scrambled” may be cluing “eggs” via meaning but also saying there is an anagram available.
Thus, in Dollarbill’s “TEARS”, clued as ” Some sad streaming contents (5)”, we can find “sad” connected with the meaning — when you are sad what is streaming from your eyes? why, “tears”! –. And maybe also serving together with “contents” to say look for something contained in the words of the clue then make them “sad” i.e. mixed up — so in “STREAming” we see contained “STREA” then anagram it to “TEARS”.
Once again, this is “cryptic” clues, not “crostic” clues. A crossword layout and game can use conventional meaning/identification clues or cryptic clues or both, and an acrostic layout and game can also use both.
”
In essence, a cryptic clue leads to its answer as long as it is read in the right way. What the clue appears to say when read normally (the surface reading) is a distraction and usually has nothing to do with the clue answer. The challenge is to find the way of reading the clue that leads to the solution.
A typical clue consists of two parts, the definition and the wordplay. It provides two ways of getting to the answer. The definition, which usually exactly matches the part of speech, tense, and number of the answer, is in essence the same as any ‘straight’ crossword clue, a synonym for the answer. It usually appears at the start or the end of a clue.
The other part (the subsidiary indication, or wordplay) provides an alternative route to the answer (this part would be a second definition in the case of double definition clues). One of the tasks of the solver is to find the boundary between definition and wordplay and insert a mental pause there when reading the clue cryptically. This wordplay gives the solver some instructions on how to get to the answer another way. (Sometimes the two parts are joined with a link word or phrase such as “from”, “gives” or “could be”.)
There are many sorts of wordplay, such as anagrams and double definitions, but they all conform to rules. The crossword setters do their best to stick to these rules when writing their clues, and solvers can use these rules and conventions to help them solve the clues. Noted cryptic setter Derrick Somerset Macnutt (who wrote cryptics under the pseudonym of Ximenes) discusses the importance and art of fair cluemanship in his seminal book on cryptic crosswords, Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966, reprinted 2001).[6]
Because a typical cryptic clue describes its answer in detail and often more than once, the solver can usually have a great deal of confidence in the answer once it has been determined. The clues are ‘self-checking’. This is in contrast to non-cryptic crossword clues which often have several possible answers and force the solver to use the crossing letters to distinguish which was intended.
Here is an example (taken from The Guardian crossword of 6 August 2002, set by “Shed”).
15D Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke (8)
is a clue for TRAGICAL. This breaks down as follows.
15D indicates the location and direction (down) of the solution in the grid
“Very sad” is the definition
“unfinished story” gives “tal” (“tale” with one letter missing; i.e., unfinished)
“rising smoke” gives “ragic” (a “cigar” is a smoke and this is a down clue so “rising” indicates that “cigar” should be written up the page; i.e., backwards)
“about” means that the letters of “tal” should be put either side of “ragic”, giving “tragical”
“(8)” says that the answer is a single word of eight letters.
There are many “code words” or “indicators” that have a special meaning in the cryptic crossword context. (In the example above, “about”, “unfinished” and “rising” all fall into this category). Learning these, or being able to spot them, is a useful and necessary part of becoming a skilled cryptic crossword solver.
“
My own observation, is that every crossword designer has a few favorite words — generally short and vowel-heavy — that get used constantly.
I’ve just begun doing crosswords on a new app, and I’ve already noticed several words this guys leans heavily on. Sometimes two or three days in a row.
By the way, I take full responsibility for some of the confusion: this clue was indeed from a crostic rather that a crossword puzzle.
I wonder why my post (‘How can you fit CAPTAIN KANGAROO into five spaces?’, or words to that effect) didn’t show up. Doesn’t seem worthy of moderation. Too geezery?)
Treesong, I see nothing of yours in Moderation.
@ Bill – Perhaps that comment went directly to “trash”?
Cryptic Crossword clue I’d like to see:
Initially Mary comes, then I come and sounds like two asses come, then I come again and sounds like two asses again, then I pee twice and I come again at the end in the big river: MISSISSIPPI
Kilby, when somebody reports a “missing” post and it’s not in Moderation, I always check the Spam and Trash folders as well (the only time I wade into those folders).
Long before the world of televised poker tournaments settled on “Texas Hold ‘Em” as the horrible standard variant to use, requiring its specific vocabulary, those of us who enjoyed a friendly game of “Dealer’s Choice” would accept almost all variants, but were a little skeptical about some from the back of the Hoyle booklet using “community cards” — the prime example of which was “Spit in the Ocean”. But I always wondered if that had been cleaned up from “Piss in the Ocean”.
“then I pee twice”
I think you need a comma in there, or else it would be “IPIP” (MISSISSIPIPI)
Initially Mary comes
Nah. It’s supposed to be like an Italian accent. “First Emma comes . . . .”
Arg. Broke the HTML.
It’s not as iconic as the ENCYCLOPEDIA song, but there is a familiar usual tune for spelling MISSISSIPPI
There are at least two tunes for spelling MISSISSIPPI. One of them I learned as a kid in my first year of taking piano lessons. “That used to be so hard to spell, it used to make me cry. But since I’ve studied spelling, it’s just like pumpkin pie: M I S S I S S I P P I.” The other one goes “M I crooked letter crooked letter I, crooked letter crooked letter I, hunchback hunchback I.” But my favorite spelling song is “Constantinople” as recorded by Paul Whiteman, not to be confused with a different Constantinople song recorded by They Might Be Giants.
As to the comma, “then I pee, twice” would still be IPIP. “then I, pee twice” would look wrong. And Brian in STL, you’re right, the real ending is “We do NOT discuss our sex lives when riding on public transportation!” “Whos-a discussing our sex-a lives? I’m-a tell my friend how to spell Mississippi.”
My MISSISSIPPI spelling song is nowhere near that sophisticated! Nor does it have more lyrics. It’s just the letter names, in a sort of chant, with some sharply marked accents: M i ss I ss I pp I.
MiB your thing about “crooked letter” reminds me of that gimmick song or spoken oddity of “h – e – double-hockey-sticks” to avoid uttering “hell”. For me that’s sort of a summer-day-camp-bus song, like “Caphusalem, the daughter of Jerusalem.”. Also “Caractacus” [perhaps more properly just “Caratacus”], a name which came up in another of those songs, with a somewhat tricky rhythm (for kids) — I was a bit surprised when that name came up, and indeed the character was shown on screen, in the old “I, Claudius” limited-series I watched recently to follow along with the John Hodgman podcast about it — and as I say, I was surprised to learn he was a British leader who resisted the Roman conquest. I associated his song with the “Caphusalem, the daughter of Jerusalem.” song and thought he was another Macabee or the like.
Mis sis sippi – it used to be so hard to spell, it used to make me cry. – only Mississippi spelling song I know.
Clarabell the clown came first to my mind – actually Clarabelle the cow did not come not come it at all. I think we have a Howdy Doody There is a marionette in the basement that came from in-laws’ house at some point and 78rpm children’s single that came from my parent’s house (I think it is yellow in color) from when I was young.
First time I came across “black and white cookie” in a crossword puzzle it had me confused. There is the NYC area (if nowhere else) a cookie that is named same. It is a vanilla (at least in color if not taste) cookie thick enough to be cake like and half the top is frosted with chocolate icing and half with vanilla – one can even get them in 7-11s here. I could not figure out to fit that cookie into 4 letters and as I thought about it, it was too localized to be used. One problem is that since my family was on and off Kosher (and always so for after school snacks like cookies which I took to Hebrew school) as were other relatives – it was more likely to be Sunshine Hydrox cookies than Oreo growing up.
At our cat rescue organization, Oreo is one of the most often seen names for a black-and-white cat.
Two seconds ago, I watched a video of a Dalmatian named . . . Oreo.
How odd. The last two comments in this thread (#50 from me and #51 from Andrea) are not showing in the “Recert Comments” list, but do show up in search from larK’s scanner.
Maybe they were in Moderation long enough to have no longer been “recent” by the time they were freed?
Umm, no, I saw mine on the page immediately after submitting it — it wasn’t in moderation at all, just didn’t show in the sidebar list. I figure it has something to do with the 50-comment page-break thing.
Just a thought.
You’ve seen things on the page that aren’t in the sidebar. I’ve seen things in the sidebar that aren’t on the page. We all know about moderation. Forget it, Mitch4, it’s WordPress.
Probably the issue has to do with bad/over use of javascript on the main page, whereas the rss feed (from which I scrape) is more straightforward and simple. I envision something like this: the rss page is small and simple: you request it, it does a query of the database, and returns the page — fast, reliable, and replicable; the main page probably has the user’s machine running javascript to decide when to request an asynchronous update on the recent postings list — this is complicated, slow, and totally unreplicable, because it runs on each user’s machine instead of on the server. The “advantage” of doing it this way is if you spend a long time reading the thread, without refreshing the page, the recent comments list will still be (more or less) up to date since it will be constantly refreshing itself and redisplaying. (Of course, the problems come in from the fact that it can’t continuously be refreshing itself, because that would tie up the server way too much, so it has to pick an optimized schedule for refreshing, and in fact probably prevents any given client from refreshing too often. So, upshot, if you had just (automatically) refreshed before you submit you post, you are prevented from refreshing again, so you don’t see your own post until you are allowed to refresh again.)
This is all conjecture on my part — I have not bothered to look at the wordpress codebase, nor even have I observed the behavior I posit above about the auto-refreshing, but it seems very plausible to me to be what causes the weirdness I and others have noted.
larK, I suspect it’s not that. I run with Javascript turned off, and when something doesn’t seem right I manually hit refresh.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Is the “D.” part of the name (which would confuse me), or is it part of some indicator for the puzzle it was part of? I don’t know a “D. Clarabell”.
I think the “D.” means that this was the fourth word in the puzzle (preceded by “A.”, “B.”, and “C.”). Using Bill’s “geezer” classification as a (big) hint, the answer is probably “clown“. Since “Howdy Doody” went off the air before I was born, this is definitely a “geezer” clue.
I knew the answer through general cultural osmosis, but I would definitely classify this one as geezer. I was surprised to learn that Howdy Doody ran until 1960 and there are a fair number of references from later years, but you’d pretty much have to be in your late 60s to have regularly watched it.
Or you could have read ‘It’ by S. King: he was the archetype of clowns before Ronald McDonald.
I thought Clarabell was a cow (a dairy company logo, perhaps?), so other than ‘dairy’, I’d no idea. Never saw H-D.
@Andrea: Clarabelle Cow is a Disney character (often seen with Horace Horsecollar).
I knew the Howdy Doody reference, but my first thought was “cow.” “Cow” obviously not fitting the space, brain had to engage the Memory Search function.
And why I’d’ve known that . . . ?? Have never seen either.
The idea of Clarabell being a geezer reference is like Lucille Ball being a geezer reference. Some things don’t need to be witnessed in person to be known.
And what is the Welsh word going down and crossing this one on the W? (jk)
D is for Down
Goodbye kids
Bill: we’ve started doing a lot of crosswords lately; it would seem to me that one of the prerequisites to doing crosswords is to be a geezer, because half of the clues are geezer clues. Anytime there is a “slang” type clue (“as the young kids might say”), it’s invariably something from the 1940s or earlier (naturally I can’t remember a single damn instance now — something like “hootch”, or “cool”). Another thing we’ve noticed is that almost every damn puzzle has “epeé” as an answer — is that like some kind of in-joke, or are crossword authors just that lazy?
@ larK – Words like “epee” (or “anoa”, or “ara”) get worked into crossword puzzles more often than they should because they have a convenient abundance of vowels. You should be happy that you don’t have to deal with German puzzles, in which the clues have become so repetitive that you can buy a dictionary of standard clues, with the solution for each. Further oddities: German puzzles are normally rectangular (not square), and have none of the symmetry that has become “standard” in American puzzles, especially since there is usually a bite taken out of one corner, in which the solution for the previous day is placed. Letter boxes are much larger, because the word separation boxes are used to place the clues for the next word.
You think that’s a geezer reference? I just had crossword reference Napoleon! Now that’s old.
” is that like some kind of in-joke, or are crossword authors just that lazy?”
Um, how hard do you work at creating your puzzles?
Actually it’s the obsession with OREOs that bemuses me. I think that’s both an in joke and a convenientuse of vowels. The weirdest clue for OREO I’ve seen was “Some people eat them with mustard” which must clearly have been a deliberate in joke.
@IarK and @Kilby – don’t forget “Koko’s weapon” – “snee” and “Japanese sash” – “obi”. I’d see those so many times my hand didn’t even need to pause filling them in.
Yes, many crossword puzzles are written with geezer clues. All sorts of names from the Thin Man movies, for instance. Recently, one NYT puzzle used modern slang and got in trouble for it because in the past few years its meaning changed to become its own antonym.
My favorite clue for “oreo” was “crossword puzzle cookie”. That was in the Washington Post puzzle.
Back to HD – I never watched that show as a kid, but I knew the answer. My girlfriend in college did, and we went to see a HD revival tour in Boston in 1971 or so.
FWIW, the show ran in reruns until the early 1970s.
But should it be cow rather than clown,
ANGUS
BISON
BOSSY
6 letters: cattle, bovine, Bessie, moo-moo
woozy: I do not accept that cop-out of if I don’t do x then I have no right to complain about someone else’s execution of x. What I do do, I do well, and I take pride in my work; if I were to make a crossword puzzle, or even make a career out of making crossword puzzles, I would do that well. If I am to the point where I am such a hack that I just constantly reuse tired, bad clues because of their convenience for me, then I should either quit, or at least try to camouflage my indifference to my work by at least acknowledging what I am doing — I think I have seen the “crossword puzzle cookie” clue for Oreo before, and as long as it’s not overdone, it’s a clever acknowledgement (and I suppose if you really, really overdo it, it becomes a kind of joke in a different way…) Which is why I asked if it’s maybe an in-joke — the hack could grab on to that as a life-line.
(And anyway, we are in a site that is all about discussing comics: would you insist that all of us have a published comic strip before we are allowed to comment?)
There is now a database of crossword clues and answers. I think some constructors are trying very hard not to reuse any clue that’s ever been used before. So, Clarabell for CLOWN is not so much a nod to geezers as it is a desire for novelty.
OTOH, I see in that database that in 2003, CrosSynergy clued CLOWN as ‘Clarabell on “Howdy Doody”‘. But as of the current database, it had not been used again in any of the dozen-plus puzzles they collect clues from.
Okay, then … they *don’t* use epee every puzzle. Just one out of 7 puzzles or so use it. And it’s not as common as other words and its a valid strategy to use common words to use letters. The alternative would be to use *original* words with unusual letter combinations. But those would be too obscure and to difficult and *un*fair.
To put this comic strip complaint this is like complaining why do comic strips always convey passage of time through separate panels. That’s an idea nearly 200 years old and no one has come up with anything more original? Are cartoonists that lazy or are readers so inured to unoriginality they expect i?
That’s not a valid complaint to me mind. It’s a failure to recognize the practicality of conventions that are virtues and completely misses the point.
I’ve been doing a lot of crossword puzzles recently too. They also have a lot of Bible references, including obscure ones like “Bible guy with a talking ass” (Balaam). Are those geezer clues too? because who born after 1970 grew up reading the Bible? But on the whole, you have to be a very old geezer. One clue was “Author of Romola”. The answer was “Eliot”, George Eliot of course. We all know Silas Marner and Mill on the Floss but who remembers Romola? There are also plenty of current movie actors and sports figures in the puzzles.
My mom and I do at least one crossword a week – the weekly in the SF Chronicle. Yes, there are a _lot_ of reused clues, though it goes in cycles – we got NENE (Hawaiian goose) a couple weeks ago after not seeing it for years, and it used to be in about every other puzzle.
We can do old sports and actors (male and female), but the modern stuff we both draw blanks on more often than not. You need to know what teams belong to what cities in many and various sports…we usually get most of the letters by crossing and come up with the answer somehow (from Oh yeah! to a complete guess – “this makes a word…”). The worst are when one (pop-culture) name crosses another; we’ll give up and look it up if we stall out long enough.
Oh yeah – and the only thing Clarabelle meant to me was cow. Not something I’ve picked up by osmosis, and I’ve never seen any Howdy Doody (and I don’t watch/read horror, so I didn’t get the King version either).
“The worst are when one (pop-culture) name crosses another”
I’m not sure who said it, but, one of the rules of modern crossword construction is, “Never cross an unknowable with an ungettable.”
Acrostics are not crosswords at all, but they are clued A., B., C., so D. Clarabell (5) would be CLOWN and should actually be clued “Clarabell, for example.” The cow was spelled Clarabelle, btw.
Obligatory clues:
All puzzles are syndicated. The better ones sometimes include a few clever clues indicated by a question mark at the end. This indicates “not a straight clue” or “use lateral thinking” or “another part of speech for one of the words in here”. Like
Layer (3)…HEN
The next one depends on the spelling of the name, to mislead you.
Refrain from MacDonald’s (5)…EIEIO
Extra minute (7)…TEENIER
Some sad streaming contents (5)…TEARS
Interestingly, when I put Clarabelle into google, Clarabelle Cow comes up first thing.
I’d never heard “Some crossword puzzle writers overuse ‘Oreo'” before this afternoon.
So of course doing a crossword puzzle just now just now, I encountered “Cookie that crossword puzzle fans are tired of.”
“when I put Clarabelle into google, Clarabelle Cow comes up first thing.”
What happens when you put Clarabell into Google?
Woops – spelt correctly (well, as the original clue, which I’d completely forgotten about), the clown comes up first.
Much as I love words, I loathe crossword puzzles. My mind just doesn’t work that way, I guess.
“Cookie that crossword puzzle fans are tired of.”
The database show 3331 *different* clues for OREO, a couple of them used over 100 times each.
I think Dollarbill is getting at two different things at once. Yes, there is a difference between “crossword” layout and “acrostic” layout (or back in the day we also had “double-crostic”), and beyond layout there are some differences in the game.
But that is not the same thing as the style of clues, with Dollarbill’s “TEARS” providing a nice example of the “cryptic” clue.
Sometimes a crossword feature is positioned as “Our weekly cryptic crossword” or whatever like that, and the point is that all or most of the clues will be in the cryptic clue style, maybe with some admixture of jokey or punning ones, like Dollarbill’s “TEENIER”. Also, sometimes in U.S. publications you will see something called “British style crossword” — that seems to mean some mixture of cryptic clues and standard definitional / synonym / identification clues. (Also, those “British style” crosswords tend to use shorter, more condensed or disguised cryptic clues, whereas American “cryptic crosswords” are very, not to say flat-footed, but diligent about the conventions of cryptic cluing.)
The essence of a cryptic clue is that the light (that is: the answer, the letters that are to be entered into the diagram) is indicated in TWO WAYS in the clue: once as meaning (by definition / synonym / allusion), and again in some other route, such as anagram, or hidden in the overlapping of letters in adjacent words of the clue, or in pun, etc. Plus, there tends to be some indicator of which type of disguised secondary clue is being used — thus, “disturbed” or “crazy” or (all too obviously) “scrambled” will point to anagramming, while a simple “in” may indicate hidden sequence of letters. Of course, it’s pleasingly skillful if these pointers are there for another purpose in the text of the clue, for instance if eggs are significant then a “scrambled” may be cluing “eggs” via meaning but also saying there is an anagram available.
Thus, in Dollarbill’s “TEARS”, clued as ” Some sad streaming contents (5)”, we can find “sad” connected with the meaning — when you are sad what is streaming from your eyes? why, “tears”! –. And maybe also serving together with “contents” to say look for something contained in the words of the clue then make them “sad” i.e. mixed up — so in “STREAming” we see contained “STREA” then anagram it to “TEARS”.
Once again, this is “cryptic” clues, not “crostic” clues. A crossword layout and game can use conventional meaning/identification clues or cryptic clues or both, and an acrostic layout and game can also use both.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptic_crossword#How_cryptic_clues_work
”
In essence, a cryptic clue leads to its answer as long as it is read in the right way. What the clue appears to say when read normally (the surface reading) is a distraction and usually has nothing to do with the clue answer. The challenge is to find the way of reading the clue that leads to the solution.
A typical clue consists of two parts, the definition and the wordplay. It provides two ways of getting to the answer. The definition, which usually exactly matches the part of speech, tense, and number of the answer, is in essence the same as any ‘straight’ crossword clue, a synonym for the answer. It usually appears at the start or the end of a clue.
The other part (the subsidiary indication, or wordplay) provides an alternative route to the answer (this part would be a second definition in the case of double definition clues). One of the tasks of the solver is to find the boundary between definition and wordplay and insert a mental pause there when reading the clue cryptically. This wordplay gives the solver some instructions on how to get to the answer another way. (Sometimes the two parts are joined with a link word or phrase such as “from”, “gives” or “could be”.)
There are many sorts of wordplay, such as anagrams and double definitions, but they all conform to rules. The crossword setters do their best to stick to these rules when writing their clues, and solvers can use these rules and conventions to help them solve the clues. Noted cryptic setter Derrick Somerset Macnutt (who wrote cryptics under the pseudonym of Ximenes) discusses the importance and art of fair cluemanship in his seminal book on cryptic crosswords, Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966, reprinted 2001).[6]
Because a typical cryptic clue describes its answer in detail and often more than once, the solver can usually have a great deal of confidence in the answer once it has been determined. The clues are ‘self-checking’. This is in contrast to non-cryptic crossword clues which often have several possible answers and force the solver to use the crossing letters to distinguish which was intended.
Here is an example (taken from The Guardian crossword of 6 August 2002, set by “Shed”).
15D Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke (8)
is a clue for TRAGICAL. This breaks down as follows.
15D indicates the location and direction (down) of the solution in the grid
“Very sad” is the definition
“unfinished story” gives “tal” (“tale” with one letter missing; i.e., unfinished)
“rising smoke” gives “ragic” (a “cigar” is a smoke and this is a down clue so “rising” indicates that “cigar” should be written up the page; i.e., backwards)
“about” means that the letters of “tal” should be put either side of “ragic”, giving “tragical”
“(8)” says that the answer is a single word of eight letters.
There are many “code words” or “indicators” that have a special meaning in the cryptic crossword context. (In the example above, “about”, “unfinished” and “rising” all fall into this category). Learning these, or being able to spot them, is a useful and necessary part of becoming a skilled cryptic crossword solver.
“
My own observation, is that every crossword designer has a few favorite words — generally short and vowel-heavy — that get used constantly.
I’ve just begun doing crosswords on a new app, and I’ve already noticed several words this guys leans heavily on. Sometimes two or three days in a row.
By the way, I take full responsibility for some of the confusion: this clue was indeed from a crostic rather that a crossword puzzle.
I wonder why my post (‘How can you fit CAPTAIN KANGAROO into five spaces?’, or words to that effect) didn’t show up. Doesn’t seem worthy of moderation. Too geezery?)
Treesong, I see nothing of yours in Moderation.
@ Bill – Perhaps that comment went directly to “trash”?
Cryptic Crossword clue I’d like to see:
Initially Mary comes, then I come and sounds like two asses come, then I come again and sounds like two asses again, then I pee twice and I come again at the end in the big river: MISSISSIPPI
Kilby, when somebody reports a “missing” post and it’s not in Moderation, I always check the Spam and Trash folders as well (the only time I wade into those folders).
Long before the world of televised poker tournaments settled on “Texas Hold ‘Em” as the horrible standard variant to use, requiring its specific vocabulary, those of us who enjoyed a friendly game of “Dealer’s Choice” would accept almost all variants, but were a little skeptical about some from the back of the Hoyle booklet using “community cards” — the prime example of which was “Spit in the Ocean”. But I always wondered if that had been cleaned up from “Piss in the Ocean”.
“then I pee twice”
I think you need a comma in there, or else it would be “IPIP” (MISSISSIPIPI)
Initially Mary comes
Nah. It’s supposed to be like an Italian accent. “First Emma comes . . . .”
Arg. Broke the HTML.
It’s not as iconic as the ENCYCLOPEDIA song, but there is a familiar usual tune for spelling MISSISSIPPI
There are at least two tunes for spelling MISSISSIPPI. One of them I learned as a kid in my first year of taking piano lessons. “That used to be so hard to spell, it used to make me cry. But since I’ve studied spelling, it’s just like pumpkin pie: M I S S I S S I P P I.” The other one goes “M I crooked letter crooked letter I, crooked letter crooked letter I, hunchback hunchback I.” But my favorite spelling song is “Constantinople” as recorded by Paul Whiteman, not to be confused with a different Constantinople song recorded by They Might Be Giants.
As to the comma, “then I pee, twice” would still be IPIP. “then I, pee twice” would look wrong. And Brian in STL, you’re right, the real ending is “We do NOT discuss our sex lives when riding on public transportation!” “Whos-a discussing our sex-a lives? I’m-a tell my friend how to spell Mississippi.”
My MISSISSIPPI spelling song is nowhere near that sophisticated! Nor does it have more lyrics. It’s just the letter names, in a sort of chant, with some sharply marked accents: M i ss I ss I pp I.
MiB your thing about “crooked letter” reminds me of that gimmick song or spoken oddity of “h – e – double-hockey-sticks” to avoid uttering “hell”. For me that’s sort of a summer-day-camp-bus song, like “Caphusalem, the daughter of Jerusalem.”. Also “Caractacus” [perhaps more properly just “Caratacus”], a name which came up in another of those songs, with a somewhat tricky rhythm (for kids) — I was a bit surprised when that name came up, and indeed the character was shown on screen, in the old “I, Claudius” limited-series I watched recently to follow along with the John Hodgman podcast about it — and as I say, I was surprised to learn he was a British leader who resisted the Roman conquest. I associated his song with the “Caphusalem, the daughter of Jerusalem.” song and thought he was another Macabee or the like.
Mis sis sippi – it used to be so hard to spell, it used to make me cry. – only Mississippi spelling song I know.
Clarabell the clown came first to my mind – actually Clarabelle the cow did not come not come it at all. I think we have a Howdy Doody There is a marionette in the basement that came from in-laws’ house at some point and 78rpm children’s single that came from my parent’s house (I think it is yellow in color) from when I was young.
First time I came across “black and white cookie” in a crossword puzzle it had me confused. There is the NYC area (if nowhere else) a cookie that is named same. It is a vanilla (at least in color if not taste) cookie thick enough to be cake like and half the top is frosted with chocolate icing and half with vanilla – one can even get them in 7-11s here. I could not figure out to fit that cookie into 4 letters and as I thought about it, it was too localized to be used. One problem is that since my family was on and off Kosher (and always so for after school snacks like cookies which I took to Hebrew school) as were other relatives – it was more likely to be Sunshine Hydrox cookies than Oreo growing up.
At our cat rescue organization, Oreo is one of the most often seen names for a black-and-white cat.
Two seconds ago, I watched a video of a Dalmatian named . . . Oreo.
How odd. The last two comments in this thread (#50 from me and #51 from Andrea) are not showing in the “Recert Comments” list, but do show up in search from larK’s scanner.
Maybe they were in Moderation long enough to have no longer been “recent” by the time they were freed?
Umm, no, I saw mine on the page immediately after submitting it — it wasn’t in moderation at all, just didn’t show in the sidebar list. I figure it has something to do with the 50-comment page-break thing.
Just a thought.
You’ve seen things on the page that aren’t in the sidebar. I’ve seen things in the sidebar that aren’t on the page. We all know about moderation. Forget it, Mitch4, it’s WordPress.
Probably the issue has to do with bad/over use of javascript on the main page, whereas the rss feed (from which I scrape) is more straightforward and simple. I envision something like this: the rss page is small and simple: you request it, it does a query of the database, and returns the page — fast, reliable, and replicable; the main page probably has the user’s machine running javascript to decide when to request an asynchronous update on the recent postings list — this is complicated, slow, and totally unreplicable, because it runs on each user’s machine instead of on the server. The “advantage” of doing it this way is if you spend a long time reading the thread, without refreshing the page, the recent comments list will still be (more or less) up to date since it will be constantly refreshing itself and redisplaying. (Of course, the problems come in from the fact that it can’t continuously be refreshing itself, because that would tie up the server way too much, so it has to pick an optimized schedule for refreshing, and in fact probably prevents any given client from refreshing too often. So, upshot, if you had just (automatically) refreshed before you submit you post, you are prevented from refreshing again, so you don’t see your own post until you are allowed to refresh again.)
This is all conjecture on my part — I have not bothered to look at the wordpress codebase, nor even have I observed the behavior I posit above about the auto-refreshing, but it seems very plausible to me to be what causes the weirdness I and others have noted.
larK, I suspect it’s not that. I run with Javascript turned off, and when something doesn’t seem right I manually hit refresh.