Today’s xkcd

Caution: Today’s xkcd, “Ten Years,” is likely to bring tears.

Neat’s-foot madeleine

[Peanuts, November 19, 1973.]

Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.

And now, fifty-plus years after my baseball boyhood, I finally know what neat’s-foot oil is. I’m glad I didn’t know back then.

Hidden Mongols

At Oddments of High Importance, Mike found a box of ten Mongols in a filing cabinet. Bonus: an Artgum eraser.

Staying put

I think John Gruber’s words deserve to be shared:

If you’re planning a “small” family get-together for Thanksgiving, it’s every bit as irresponsible as planning a “short” drunk drive.

Gruber’s post links to a cautionary tale: one “smallish” wedding, fifty-five guests, 176 infections, seven deaths. Of the seven people who died, not one attended the wedding.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I don’t track a “best time” for doing the Newsday  Saturday Stumper. All I care about is whether I can do the puzzle. But I know that whatever my best time might be, it wasn’t for this Greg Johnson puzzle, one of the most difficult Stumpers I’ve done. Fifty minutes’ worth of difficult. Holy moly.

I had to travel all the way to the bottom right corner to find a way in, with 58-A, three letters, “Pilot’s paperwork,” and 59-D, three letters, “’50s USAF coinage.” Those two gave me 61-A, seven letters, “‘Pictures deface walls ___ than they decorate them’”: Frank Lloyd Wright.” That Frank Lloyd Wright. Sheesh, what a grouch.

I looked again at 11-D, three letters, “Letters often near ‘fax,’” and took a guess at 14-D, nine letters, “Sub-Saharan menace.” And that answer gave me 38-A, four letters, “Year-end number.” Ah, that answer again, which shows up more often in crosswords than in life. I’ll take it. I had a hunch at 35-A, four letters, “Spanish surname related to ‘Roderick.’” And things continued, hit and miss.

My final answer: 1-D, five letters, “Oxens’ humped cousins.” What?

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

4-D, six letters, “Glue-bound product.” The answer more often refers to something else these days.

8-A, seven letters, “Ready to crush the curve.” Nerdy me, I was thinking of someone all set for a final exam.

12-D, nine letters, “‘Colorful’ Federal Reserve report.” Never heard of it.

30-D, nine letters, “Lights used in navigation.” HIGHBEAMS? No.

53-A, four letters, “Name on many posters with McDormand and Buscemi.” I insist that this clue is an instance of misdirection, not a gimme.

60-A, seven letters, “Swell place.” I like the dowdy swell, as in “Gee, you’re swell,” even if it tricked me.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Sidebar revision

For anyone reading via RSS: The “I” in my sidebar now wears a mask and is socially distanced. Elaine took the photograph on November 6.

Words of the year

From the Australian National Dictionary Centre, iso : “I think iso will be one way that we will talk about this period for a long time.”

From the Cambridge Dictionary, quarantine: “Our editors . . . were interested to find a new meaning emerging: ‘a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease.’”

From the Collins Dictionary, lockdown : “a unifying experience for billions of people across the world, who have had, collectively, to play their part in combating the spread of COVID-19.”

From Dictionary.com, pandemic : “The pandemic defined 2020, and it will define the years to come. It is a consequential word for a consequential year.”

Also from Dictionary.com, the People’s Word of the Year, unprecedented : “Overfamiliarity, if not overuse, has prompted the popular sentiment that we should send the word into retirement. But in 2020, unprecedented is the word that just won’t go away.”

From Macmillan Dictionary’s crowdsourced Open Dictionary, lockdown : “a word that came to us from American English but in 2020 has acquired a new meaning that will surely resonate with those who experienced it for the rest of their lives.”

From Macquarie Dictionary, doomscrolling : “a very salient marker of 2020, with its barrage of troubling news, from the bushfires to the US elections and, of course, coronavirus.”

From Merriam-Webster, pandemic : “This has been a year unlike any other (the word unprecedented also had a significant spike in March), and pandemic is the word that has connected the worldwide medical emergency to the political response and to our personal experience of it all.”

From Oxford Languages, many words: “Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.”

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive.

Nail-biter and others

Nail-biter and others: Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster looks at words of the 2020 election.

And yes, people have been looking up interregnum.

“Himes nailed it”

Seth Jacobs, historian:

“The highest compliment that I can pay to a Jesuit education is that I really, really wish I had received one. Father Michael Himes nailed it when he said, ‘The purpose of an undergraduate education, particularly a Jesuit education, is a rigorous and sustained conversation about the most important questions relating to the human condition with the widest possible circle of the best possible conversation partners.’ And as he points out, many of those conversation partners aren’t breathing anymore, which is why we have libraries and teachers.”

Items in a series

Mara Gay, speaking on The 11th Hour a few minutes ago, suggested that it’s necessary to now marginalize Donald Trump* and bring people back to “reality, science, kindness, and democracy.” Yes.