Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, turned out to be far easier than I thought it would be. Lots of fine clues and unexpected answers, and two fairly ridiculous answers. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Intriguing development.” The wording carries a lot of weight.

5-D, six letters, “Swing shifts?” Nicely done.

18-A, ten letters, “What Hemingway got for his WWll reporting.” Something to know that I did not know.

14-A, fourteen letters, “It has its ups and downs.” ROLLERCOASTER comes up, or down, short.

24-A, six letters, “Quick glances.” Easier to see than I expected.

28-D, four letters, “May day nickname.” It’s not a nickname for a day in May. The intersection of 28-D and 40-A is for me the low point of the puzzle.

36-A, fifteen letters, “Synthesizer’s hard rock.” See? Unexpected.

37-D, eight letters, “‘Smells Like a Man, Man’ sloganeer.” Or at least a man of a certain age?

38-D, eight letters, “Somewhat sticky.” I don’t think there’s any redeeming this word.

40-A, five letters, “Sort of gray.” Okay, it’s a word, but still. A change of one letter would make 28-D and 40-A better players in this puzzle.

45-A, six letters, “Where Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress.” Yes, I read lots of seventeenth-century prose in grad school.

50-D, four letters, “Makeup, e.g.” Clever.

My favorite in this puzzle, because it’s just so strange: 55-A, ten letters, “Trouble spots on radar.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Martin Mull (1943–2024)

“The comedic actor, musician and artist who gained widespread attention in the 1970s in shows such as Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Fernwood 2-Night ”: The New York Times has an obituary. The Fernwood episode with Tom Waits is not to be missed.

[The correct styling: Fernwood 2 Night.]

Ooh

I just discovered that Orange Crate Art was added to ooh.directory earlier this month. OCA is one of 2,299 blogs listed on the site, and one of 358 blogs categorized as personal. Here’s the listing.

Orange Crate Art: it’s personal!

One ooh.directory blog I’ve added to my RSS: The Public Domain Review. Another: Separated by a Common Language, about British and American English.

Did you know that “naming sauces by colo(u)r seems to be a monocultural thing”?

On last night’s debate

From the latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

And:

About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don’t day trade politics. It’s a sucker’s game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn’t have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn’t going to win this race.”

I hope he’s right.

[The contrast between Joe Biden on the stage and Joe Biden speaking to a crowd afterward was noteworthy.]

Game changer

I am given to understand that many people watching the presidential debate tonight will be looking for a game changer. If I trust the commercials that appear on my television, nearly everything these days is a game changer. “Game changer!” I think it’s time to constrain the use of this term:

game changer /ˈgām-ˌchān-jər/ noun
: one who abandons one board game for another in an arbitrary, capricious manner

Example sentence: Kyle invited us over for a game of Clue, but then he wanted to play Uno, and now he wants Trouble. What a game changer!

[Pronunciation borrowed from Merriam-Webster.]

Diagramming sentences

At the Public Domain Review, Hunter Dukes writes about “American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century”:

More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.

Dukes provides many examples of these efforts (with links to the books they’re drawn from). Here is a fairly tame diagram of a syntax tree, from Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge’s A Comprehensive English Grammar (1890):

[Click for a larger tree, which you must imagine as standing upright.]

Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellog’s streamlined (and soil-less, and bark-less) approach to diagramming sentences — still taught in some schools — is an earlier invention, introduced in Higher Lessons in English (1877). I wonder why anyone would have opted for the ornateness of Gauss–Hodge instead.

Thanks, Steven, for letting me know about this PDR post.

A related post
“We’re supposed to decorate a sentence”

Off the bot

In response to a comment from Matthew Schmeer that describes inventive assignments to keep students from turning in AI-generated writing, I came up with a phrase that I’d like to share: “off the bot,” after “off the grid.”

I am thinking and writing off the bot. Off the bot!

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

“Human interaction might be preferred”

I asked ChatGPT: “What would be some good reasons not to use ChatGPT?” It came through with ten — concerns about accuracy, concerns about accuracy, privacy, bias, and so on — and offered to provide more details. The phrasing in this passage is what most struck me:

Lack of Human Touch: For tasks requiring empathy, emotional intelligence, or nuanced understanding, human interaction might be preferred.

Might be preferred!

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[The ways in which I’ve found AI useful to me: creating Alfred workflows and a Pinboard bookmarklet. That’s all.]

Domestic comedy

“What does this guy have his high beam on?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Only one headlight. “What does”: not a typo. More like Brooklynese.]

The joys of repetition

Reading a book to a child on a train:

Alice Munro, “To Reach Japan,” in Dear Life: Stories (New York: Vintage, 2012).

Related reading
All OCA Alice Munro posts (Pinboard)