The prodigal failson

Last year the word failsonry had me stumped. The word I really needed to look up: failson. Molly Jong-Fast explains (The Daily Beast ).

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Words of the year Now with upcycling.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is credited to “Lester Ruff.” That’s the pseudonym Stan Newman uses for easier Saturday Stumpers of his making. Today’s puzzle though seemed to me decidedly not easy, though still solvable. I’d change the byline to Maura Ruff.

Some choice clues: 1-A, ten letters, “Stumpery clue for ‘broom.’” 13-D, nine letters, “What the Remember the Milk app helps with.” (I nerded out there.) 37-A, three letters, “Blower, briefly.” 45-A, ten letters, “Hippie quest.”

A clue that baffled me, even after I had the answer: 27-A, three letters, “Letters associated with ticker tape.” Another: 54-D, four letters, “Guy from Jericho.” Maura Ruff, you sneak!

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Margaret Atwood on Little Lulu

In The New Yorker, Margaret Atwood writes about “The Life Lessons of Little Lulu.” The first three:

1. It’s O.K. to have curls.

2. It’s O.K. to be short.

3. It’s O.K. to be female.

Follow the link to find them all.

Related reading
All OCA comics posts (Pinboard)

The age of “40”

This photograph, a few weeks old now, is as close as I will get to our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer on this Bleak Friday. Or to any store today.

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “A Vegetarian Thanksgiving,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

Thanksgiving 1919

In 1919 Thanksgiving fell on November 27. This ad appeared in The New York Times on November 16, 1919.


[Click for a larger squirrel.]

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.

[Today 223 and 225 Fulton Street are ghosts in a pedestrian area between One World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial North Pool. But 309 Madison Avenue is fresh&co, offering a “blended nut & nut-free and gluten-free & gluten environment.”]

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

A headline today: “Trump tweets doctored photo of his head on Sylvester Stallone’s body” (The Washington Post). Keep scrolling and you’ll see it.

It’s time — for impeachment, or the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or a resignation for “medical reasons,” none of which T.S. Eliot had in mind.

Sailing out of Walden Pond

Bessie Glass has just left the bathroom where she’d been talking to her son Zooey, who is still in the bathtub, on the other side of the shower curtain. So many wonderful bits of phrasing in this passage:


J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961).

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Warfighter on The Late Show

On The Late Show last night, Stephen Colbert commented on the appearance of the word warfighters in a presidential tweet:

“Warfighters? Nobody calls them that. I’m pretty sure that’s the name of the generic video game your grandmother buys when you ask for Call of Duty. ‘It was in a three-dollar bin outside of Jo-Ann Fabrics.’”

Watch here.

Warfighter does appear in both movie and video game titles. But as Language Log pointed out in 2012, the word has its origin in military culture.

As regular readers already know, I made a post about warfighter yesterday.