Today’s Saturday Stumper

I dunno — maybe it’s just me — but the Newsday  Saturday Stumper seems to be increasing in difficulty and lessening in fun. I got it all, but clueing feels more contrary, more obscure, more strained.

From today’s Stumper, by Steve Mossberg: 38-A, four letters, “Nickname for a western capital namesake.” Have many humans been named for that capital? A search for named for [that capital] turns up a United States Navy submarine. And I doubt that she has a nickname. A search for named for the capital of [the state] turns up the submarine and a ring with a gemstone. I doubt that the ring has a nickname either. Granted, namesake need not mean “named for.” But still.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

7-D, ten letters, “Sussex cinnamon roll.” A tad obscure.

9-D, four letters, “Cultivated fields.” I am happy to say that I saw through this clue in an instant.

14-A, ten letters, “Directive when sparring.” I like the misdirection in sparring, but I wouldn’t call it the answer a directive.

23-A, four letters, “Common gathering announcement.” Tricky. I was trying for figure out what a common gathering might be.

24-D, five letters, “Mr. McMurtry alma mater.” Is it common to refer to the school where one received a graduate degree as one’s alma mater? I don’t think so. But even if it is, this is a mighty weak way to clue a school. And I don’t care where Larry McMurtry did his graduate work.

26-A, nine letters, “In which ‘language’ is lingvo .” A giveaway, I think.

28-D, ten letters, “Stale-bread Italian salad.” I guessed but have never partaken.

35-A, seven letters, “Got ready for dinner, at times.” My first guess was DRESSED. I think I was supposed to make that mistake.

41-D, seven letters, “Spanish fortified wine.” I’m back in Renaissance Prose, with the professor who’d bring a bottle and paper cups to enliven our discussions and make us feel like grown-ups.

57-A, ten letters, “Swindle saw starter.” My starting point. That answer had to be.

60-A, ten letters, “Half of a formal pairing.” A Google search suggests that it’s hardly limited to formal settings.

My favorite in this puzzle: 40-A, ten letters, “While away the hours.” I whiled away a good hour working on this puzzle.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A word in The Waste Land

“Quando fiam uti chelidon ” [When shall I become like the swallow]: words from the anonymous Latin poem Perviglium Veneris [Vigil of Venus]. They appear in line 428 of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land .

Advertisers buying placement in search-engine results are especially interested in one of these words. Dr. Pip Thornton tells Michael Rosen why in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth : “Words for Sale!”

“This is not a letter”

Letters/not-letters from Katherine Mansfield (Letters of Note ).

Related reading
All OCA Katherine Mansfield posts (Pinboard)

Phrase of the day: cacoëthes scribendi

I found it Jean Stafford’s Collected Stories (1969), in the “Author’s note,” where Stafford writes briefly of the two principal books of her childhood, one by her father, the other by a first cousin once removed. Stafford never read either book:

However, their titles influenced me when my cacoëthes scribendi set in and I wrote about twisters on the plains, stampedes when herds of longhorns were being driven up from the Panhandle to Dodge, and bloody incidents south of the border.

Merriam-Webster has it: “an uncontrollable urge to write.” Cacoëthes has an interesting past:

borrowed from Latin cacoēthes “malignant tumor at an early stage, disease of character,” borrowed from Greek kakóēthes “malignancy, wickedness,” noun derivative from neuter of kakoḗthēs “ill-disposed, malicious, (of things) abominable, (of tumors, fevers, etc.) malignant,” from kako- CACO- + -ēthēs, adjective derivative of êthos “custom, disposition, character” — more at ETHOS.

And there’s a note:

Use of the word in the sense “insatiable desire” is largely dependent on an oft-quoted line by the Roman satirist Juvenal: “tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes” (“the incurable disease of writing takes hold of many”).

The phrase appears in Juvenal’s seventh satire: “Tenet insanabile multos / Scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde senescit” [An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many, and grows old in their sick hearts].

Cacoëthes reminds me of other bad words: cacophony, of course, but also cacography (bad handwriting, bad spelling), cacology (bad diction or pronunciation), and kakistocracy (government by the worst people). Kakistos is the Greek superlative.

[Latin from The Perseus Project. English translation from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (2002).]

Griffy, Zippy, and NPR

“Th’ reassuring timbre of Mary Louise Kelly, th’ velvety tones of Steve Inskeep, th’ friendly chatter of Ari Shapiro, th’ lilting warmth of Audie Cornish”: Griffy and Zippy listen to NPR.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A speech balloon on the move

[Nancy, February 1, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s (new) Nancy , one balloon is about to pop another.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: ekphrasis

The word of the day at Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is ekphrasis: “A description of or commentary on a work of visual art.”

I’ll borrow Merriam-Webster’s etymology:

borrowed from New Latin ecphrasis, borrowed from Greek ékphrasis “description,” from ekphrad-, stem of ekphrázein “to tell over, recount, describe” (from ek- EC- + phrázein “to point out, show, tell, explain,” of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS .

I recall sitting in an NEH seminar and being told that if one wanted to befuddle colleagues, all that was necessary was to speak the word ekphrasis. Well, maybe. I’m not so sure. At any rate, the idea of ekphrasis is hardly obscure. Think of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Or Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Or back to the beginning: Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield, which you might want to seek out on your own (Iliad 18).

Related posts
Art into words : Erasmus ekphrasis : Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures

“Tin yars in Versales, Mazura”

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

This novel, which began with overtones of Dickens and Proust, shifts to a Jamesian (Henry) manner with many touches of Austenesque satire.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors” : “Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells” : No Remington, Ticonderoga : “Flatteringly, like the dentist”

Melinda Wilson (1946–2024)

The New York Times obituary describes her as the person “who rescued her future husband, the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson, from psychological ruin when they were dating in the 1980s.”

Says Brian, on Instagram: “She was my savior.”

Kranmar’s Vision Pro

[Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, in The Honeymooners episode “The Man from Space,” first aired December 31, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

From the maker of Kranmar’s Delicious Mystery Appetizer comes an AR device for the rest of us:

[Click for a larger view.]

A related post
In there and out here

[Bus icons created by Freepik — Flaticon.]