On Problematic Crossword Puzzle Vocabulary

A crossword puzzle of mine is running in today's New York Times.  It's a Triple-F puzzle -- Fine Friday Fare -- a solid themeless I suspect most people will enjoy and then forget about by the end of the day.  And that's okay by me.

The clues on some of the longer marquee answers were more straightforward than I would prefer.  My submitted clue for PUT PEN TO PAPER, for example, was "Start a book, say," which I thought was a clever redirect, as it makes the average solver think of reading before writing, but it was edited to reference writing explicitly. (Similarly, my clue for SPLITSVILLE was "A house divided?")  But this is merely a quibble, and the edits are not necessarily "wrong."  Solvers often times prefer something more straightforward, as otherwise the clues can come off as gimmicky or too clever by half.

Anyway, what I really want to talk about in this post is the entry at 5-Across: LAMEST.  I'm anticipating some criticism for this one (indeed, I got some), because the word lame, meaning inferior, is offensive to some people.  It's ableist language, implying there is something inherently bad about people who can't walk.

First, let me say upfront, this was my clue, verbatim.  It wasn't edited.  I didn't know that lame was a problematic word in certain communities.  I just learned this a few months ago.  Had I known, I would have submitted a different clue.  ("Most hobbled" seems better to me.  It's an awkward superlative, to be sure, but there is no connoted judgement.)

Lame is a word I've used and heard all my life without even thinking about its etymology.  I had never even made the connection between lame-meaning-inferior and lame-meaning-disabled.  To me, they were strictly homonyms.  It's like anemic, meaning lacking force, and anemic, meaning pertaining to the condition of anemia.  The words look and sound the same, and if you stop to think about it, you know they have the same root, but they occupy different areas in the brain.  If I read the sentence, "The Mariners offense has been anemic over the last month," I'm not thinking about hemoglobin deficiency, and I certainly don't think of it as a slight to people who have anemia.  It's just a word that means weak.

In a similar way, I thought lame was just a word that means inferior.  Even after learning that some people found it offensive, I was still not totally convinced that there was anything wrong with it.  It seemed like people trying to make something offensive that isn't offensive.  I mean, I certainly was not alone in my lame-ignorance -- I suspect even today, most people don't know it's offensive.  So, if that's the case, why not just let that be?  If almost everybody thinks two things are totally separate, then they are totally separate, and if they are totally separate then nobody need be offended.  Isn't that the better way to go?

But, upon further reflection, I disabused myself of this notion, for a two main reasons: 1) the word gay; 2) what's it to me?  On 1), it's a bit weird, and more than a bit embarrassing, to think about now, since I'm a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights, but I used to use the word gay to mean bad frequently.  It was part of my everyday vocabulary as a teenager.  I was even using it my first semester in college, and I was resistant to change under the same rationale laid out above: It's just a word that means bad; it has nothing to do with a person's sexual preference.  Thankfully, I had some patient gay friends who helped me realize what an awful argument this is, and I completely eliminated that usage from my vocabulary.  Today, over two decades later, it seems utterly ridiculous to claim that gay doesn't actually mean gay.  The parallel with lame is obvious.

On 2), even if I didn't understand why lame-qua-inferior is problematic, I don't need to.  I just need to know there is a group of the population -- rational human beings -- who find it offensive.  That should be enough to not use it.  If it's not, then I'm just being a dick.  There are nearly 200,000 words in the English language; there are dozens of synonyms for inferior; and there is a non-offensive way to clue the entry LAME (and its derivative forms) in crossword puzzles.  Why push back on this?  What's it to me?

What's it to me?  Wouldn't we all be better off if people stopped to ask this of themselves more frequently?  Yes, yes, we would.

Well, I think I've said all I have to say on this topic.  I was planning on writing another part in this post about the usage of potentially offensive language in crossword puzzles, in general (see the discussion around 25-Down in this puzzle).  But, I don't have the time or energy to tackle that one at the moment, and, if you made it this far, you've probably had your fill of me, anyway.

Until next time...

PS -- I noticed that the entry ARE YOU BLIND has an ableist tinge to it as well.  Is that an offensive statement?  I don't think so, but if Stevie Wonder wants to tell me otherwise, I will listen.

PPS -- Months after posting the above commentary, I came across this article using lame to mean weak or unconvincing: “Hateful” and “awful” may seem a bit harsh for what reads like a lame attempt at cheekiness.  The interesting thing about this is that it's an article specifically calling out the New York Times for using offensively clueless entries in its crossword puzzle!  To be honest, I've gone back and forth and back again several times on lame since first posting this.  My slightly revised position is that I probably won't use lame in a generally pejorative sense, but I don't get offended by it, and I'm not going to proselytize against it.

You Lose! Good Day, Sir!

One of the weird things about human emotion is that negative feelings feel worse than positive feelings feel good.  Even for somebody like myself who's generally happy and optimistic, the pain of loss is much stronger than the pleasure of victory.  I have this in mind today because a puzzle of mine will appear in tomorrow's New York Times, but I also recently received a rejection notice for a few other puzzles I submitted.  If we lived in a just emotional world, I would still come out on top in this scenario.  Thousands of people will do my puzzle; my family and friends will proudly show it to their family and friends; I'll get a couple hundred dollars for it.  On the other side, nobody cares that I got puzzles rejected; nobody thinks any less of me; it's an inevitable part of the submission process.  I've received a plethora of rejections through the years.  It shouldn't be that big a deal.  The good is objectively better than the bad in this situation.  The good should carry the day.  At the very least, the two things -- one plus and one minus -- should cancel each other out.  It should be no worse than a draw.  But it is worse for some reason.  Instead of basking in joy because I got another puzzle published, I'm feeling like a patzer because of my rejections.  It doesn't seem right.

There were three rejections in this round.  In one of them I duplicated a theme -- basically line-for-line -- that had been done a few years earlier, so oops... that's on me.  It's strange too, as not only have I done the NYT puzzle everyday since, like, 2003 and have no recollection of this other puzzle whatsoever, but I'm usually very diligent about searching Cruciverb to ensure any puzzles I submit have original theme ideas.  (Well, original enough, anyway.  I will duplicate the gist of an old theme idea, as long as I thought of it independently, and I add a new twist to it.)  Another one was rejected because Will and Co. thought it would be too much of a trivia test for solvers.  (I happen to like trivia tests, but I've learned that many solvers do not -- so, fair enough.)  And the last one was turned down for being too hard.  I've never had that happen before, where an editor thought it was good, but didn't think casual solvers would catch on to the theme.  My initial reaction was just run it on a Saturday then!  But that probably isn't a good idea -- solvers hate it when they lose one of their two themeless puzzles for the week.  Solvers also hate it when a puzzle is too hard for them to finish.  In my experience, there is a strong correlation between solver enjoyment and solver success.  So again, I understand the reason for the rejection, but that does little to quell the sting.  I don't want a satisfying reason for rejection; I want to not be rejected.

Anyway...  a bit about today's puzzle.

I think it's pretty good work, even if I didn't totally nail it like I wanted.  I started with the long across -- I SAID GOOD DAY, SIR -- in the middle of the puzzle.  It came from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, even though, as I later found out, Wonka never actually says these words verbatim.  (I love that movie, by the way.  I loved it as a kid, and it still holds up.)  After that I got rolling with GO HALFSIES, HIGH-FALUTIN, WHY I OUGHTA, and GET-UP-AND-GO.  If I could have finished off the SW and NE corners with a few more excellent long entries, this would have been a really dynamite puzzle.  But I think I came up just a bit short.  SOREHEAD isn't really something people say anymore (ever?), even if it is in the dictionary, and AMARETTO is ho-hum.  DIGERATI, END TIMES, and HODGE-PODGE are all fine answers, but they don't quite have the zip I was going for.  I worked and reworked those corners dozens of times.  I had at least ten different "final versions" of them, before staring at them, shaking my head, ripping them out and trying again (even now I'm fighting the urge to try to make them better just "for fun").  I don't know if what you see is the best of my efforts or just the last one before I finally caved.  To any event, as I said above, overall, I like how this one turned out, even if I'm not 100% satisfied with it.



One thing I did get right is the clues -- by which I mean a relatively small percentage of them were changed during edit.  Whether or not the solver will like them is a different story.  Personally, I'm particularly proud of my clues -- Code violation requiring an emergency exit? : ENDLESS LOOP; and One with a focus in mathematics : PARABOLA -- in no small part because I'm 65% math nerd.  I also like -- Vague threat from a Stooge : WHY I OUGHTA -- for some reason.

Alright, it's late Friday night, and I have to follow the Mariners on the MLB Game Day app and wish I was doing something else.  Until next time...

Think Q-U-I-C-K-L-Y

Pretty pleased with how this one turned out, to be honest.  The main idea is nothing earth-shattering -- spell-out-a-letter puzzles have been before; one was published in the NYT about a year ago by Zhouqin Burnikel (who else?) -- but I feel like I distinguished this one in a few ways.  First, I made the revealer an imperative clue, which I thought was a nice touch; second, the letters in QUICKLY are "fun" (or at least Scrabbly -- the tile values in QUICKLY add to 25 points); third, there are a lot of theme answers crammed into the grid -- even though most of them are short, fitting eight into a puzzle is a tall order.  So, if you judge a puzzle strictly by number of theme answers (which, of course, you should) then this one is terrific!

Because of the high theme-density, I figured there wouldn't be much room for "bonus" fill (interesting non-theme entries), so once I got the themers in place, I focused on making the grid as clean as possible, even if it meant forgoing "zippy" entries in certain places.  Was I successful in this endeavor?  I think I so; others will surely disagree.  One thing not in my favor is that I think this puzzle is misplaced on a Tuesday -- I think it should be a Wednesday puzzle.  Some of the names are more suited for a puzzle later in the week.  But then again, I'm biased because I've been shooting for a Wednesday puzzle for a long time (to hit for "the cycle"), and it remains elusive -- I've had a few Tuesdays people think are too hard and a few Thursdays people think are too easy, but no Wednesday, as yet.

I suspect some solvers are going to grouse about the proper names, not all of which are super well-known (e.g., LESAGE, YOST, ABOU).  I wouldn't mind them if I were solving this puzzle -- I like a lot of trivia in my puzzles -- but I know from prior feedback that many (most?) solvers feel differently.  I go back and forth between strictly regulating the amount of trivia I inject into my puzzles and just owning it.  At any given moment, I'm probably somewhere in the middle.  My overriding philosophy now is that I'm not going to go out of my way to add proper nouns (like I used to), but I'm going to favor them over fill I personally dislike, such as partials, random Roman numerals, and uncommon variants or abbreviations.

As an example, consider the pattern Y??T that the theme answers imposed at 44-Down.  There are three options -- YEST, YOST, and YURT.  YURT is the best entry of the three, in my opinion, because it's a (relatively) common English word.  However, YURT forces the A?R pattern at 51-Across (ABOU is literally the only thing I know of that works for ?B?U), and it forces an initial U at 49-Across, both of which are awkward given the other constraints.  Getting YURT in would have required worse trade-offs, like, say, the ugly abbreviation ABR (used once in the NYT almost 20 years ago: "Like pocket dicts.").  So, ruling out YURT, it comes down to YEST or YOST -- which is better?  In my opinion, it's YOST and it's not particularly close.  YEST is an abbreviation I cannot find anywhere.  In the dictionary it tells me it's an archaic variant of YEAST, and when I Google it, it returns mostly random gibberish.  YOST, on the other hand, might not be well-known to non-baseball fans, but he did lead the Royals to a World Series victory less than three years ago.  And when I Google "YOST," I see a link to a real thing, an actual person.  That's good.  (By the way, there is another baseball YOST -- Eddie Yost -- who might have been the greatest walker in MLB history.)

Anyway, I'm talking so much about proper nouns, and the issue solvers have with this puzzle is probably going to be something else completely.  That seems to be how it goes.  It's always something I don't even think of.  This happened to the nth degree at ACPT the week before last, where my puzzle caused much ado because some solvers interpreted it in a way I never anticipated.  You can read my take on the entire weekend here.  I've already been told that I underplay the chaos and frustration my puzzle caused, but that's mainly because I got tired of writing (and the post was already quite long).  I'm well aware, and I even had a whole other section of the post worked out in my head about hearing solvers plead their cases to the judges, but I just ran out of steam.  So it goes.

Anyway, I might hop back on and post a few more thoughts after perusing the blogosphere.  If not, until next time...

Dear Diary: ACPT Edition (No Spoilers)

This post, I suspect, is going to quickly turn into a self-congratulatory paean to the crossword community, but so be it.  It's on my first ACPT experience, and my first ACPT experience was overwhelmingly positive, so that's going to be the tone the post.  Anything less than "Wow... that was awesome!" would be disingenuous.

Also, this post is kinda long -- it's a kinda long self-congratulatory paean.

But I shall begin with one part of tournament that stressed me out a bit: I didn't know where to go or what to do once I got there.  Since one of my puzzles was to appear in the tournament, I couldn't attend as a solver, so I (happily) agreed to be a tournament official, but I didn't really know what that meant.  Some new crossword (and trivia) acquaintances, Brian Cross and Michael Berman, were gracious enough to let me ride up with them (from the DC-area), and at one point they asked me what time I needed to be there, and I was like, "Uhhh... five-o-clock?... maybe?"  I was told in an email that there would be a dinner for officials at that time, but I was never given a place.  When I inquired further, I was told it was "in flux," and I would get an announcement.  I did not get an announcement.  I figured that once I got there everything would make sense and it would all be easy to figure out (which it was), but even though I could figure that, I couldn't feel that.  I'm not laid back when it comes to making travel plans -- not at all.  I'm fine once everything is "set," but until then I anxiously obsess over every accommodation and every decision.  So, it bothered me to not have a definite time and place to meet.  (By the way, a good remedy for this condition is to marry somebody who's the exact opposite, even if it does mean your spouse will likely laugh at you for it.  Initially, I was going to take the train up, and my wife was getting a kick out of how long I deliberated over three tickets that were virtually identical -- "Just buy a ticket already!  It's not that hard!")

Thankfully, once I got to the hotel, the first person I met was Tracy Gray, who in addition to being an excellent constructor, is now one of the nicest people I know.  She got me all set up and showed me the ropes and introduced me to a bunch of the other officials -- many of whom, like Tracy, were constructors whose puzzles I always enjoy.

I didn't have any official duties on Friday, and I had some time to kill before dinner, so I just wandered around the hotel lobby for a while.  I'm not great at approaching people I don't know.  Once the introduction is done, I'm totally comfortable conversing with pretty much anybody, but I'm always apprehensive about initiating a meeting.  It's not a shyness thing, and it's not a self-confidence thing.  It's something else.  I always just assume people don't want to be bothered.  It's not rational -- especially in the context of a hotel lobby for a big event; anybody who doesn't want to be bothered can go to their room -- but a lot of how we interact with people isn't rational.  To overcome this, I decided to force myself to make an introduction or say "hi" to everybody whose name I recognized -- which was pretty much everybody in the lobby, being that it was full of crossword puzzle people, and I do crossword puzzles everyday, and then I read all the blogs about them.

It went pretty well, though.  The thing you always hear about crossword puzzle tournaments is "everybody is SO nice," and it really is true.  One of the first people I came across was Laura Braunstein, somebody I knew from Twitter/blogs, who turned out to be delightful in person.  I also said "hey" to Erik Agard, which I mention strictly to name-drop, since he is now the champion (and then some!).  The thing about introducing yourself to people in a setting like this is that it makes things significantly less awkward because otherwise you just see them around, and they know who you are and you know who they are, and it's like -- do we just talk to each other like we've met before, even though we haven't?  I inadvertently did this with some people this weekend.  At least twice, I struck up a conversation with somebody as if we had met before, and then they told me that we hadn't -- we had only ever had interactions online.  Confusing real-life with the internet -- and I'm a relatively young man -- this doesn't portend well for the future

The officiating went swimmingly from my end.  My responsibilities were easy, if tedious -- mostly marking wrong squares with a highlighter.  But the thing about tedious jobs is that you quickly bond with your coworkers because there is nothing else to do but chat with them.  Everybody was tremendous.  I feel compelled to give a shout-out to everybody I worked with, but then this entire post would just be a long list of names.  One person I will acknowledge, though, is Mike Nothnagel, who was effectively our team captain.  He's a really cool guy.  Also, a very good constructor.  I always love seeing his byline on NYT themeless puzzles, but he hasn't published there in several years.

Oh, also, I'll mention that I liked meeting Stanley Newman -- an old-school puzzler.  He's a funny guy.  He reminded me of a quirky neighbor from a '70s sitcom.  The judges dinners were buffet-style, and at the first one, several of us got there a bit early, so we were waiting around for others to arrive before we just start serving ourselves (also it was only 4:50 pm; I wasn't even hungry yet).  And Stanley comes in and says, "Ahh... the food's here!  Good!" and promptly digs in.  Well, it broke the ice; everybody followed suit.

Despite being quite tired, I spent Friday night at the hotel bar because I wanted to meet people -- and I succeeded.  I think I met half of Crossworld, and the other half I met Saturday night.  It's a pretty impressive bunch.  As I posted on Twitter, at one point I was talking to three people: The first one was a five-time Jeopardy! champ (Joon Pahk), the second was a nine-time Jeopardy! champ (Jason Keller), and the third won over $2 million on a trivia game show I had never heard of hosted by Ryan Seacrest (Andy Kravis).  Also, I hung out with Dan Felsenheld, who won twice on Jeopardy!, bringing my Jeopardy!-acquaintance-win total to 16 -- not bad for a single weekend.  I didn't realize until this tournament, how much the crossword community overlaps with the trivia community.  It make sense -- I just didn't realize it. [Update: see comment section below.  I might be undercounting the Jeopardy! totals.]

I met Brendan Emmett Quigley, which was cool, because he was the first published constructor I knew of who's my age (approximately, I think he's a few years older than me).  I remember reading a profile of him sometime in the late '90s or early '00s -- when I was just making puzzles for my parents and whichever friends would humor me -- and being super jealous.  I remember thinking: What?!  He's published, like, 30 puzzles in the New York Times?!  How does one even do that?!  The concept of actually submitting my puzzles for publication took me a surprisingly long time to realize.  I always figured an editor would notice me constructing in a coffee shop, peer over my shoulder, recognize the brilliance of my work, and offer me a contract on the spot -- a particularly fantastical hope being that I only ever made puzzles late at night alone in my room.

Also, a tidbit Brendan told me is that he doesn't like going by three names -- he just got locked into it when he was younger, and now it's too late to turn back.  It's funny how things like this become things.  When I first started publishing puzzles I used my middle initial "Damon J. Gulczynski" -- I don't even remember why.  I thought it was because Crossword Compiler had a field for author middle initial, and I just filled it in, but looking at it now, it doesn't, so I'm not sure how it started.  At some point, somebody said that middle initials are pretentious, and it made me self-conscious about using one, so I stopped.  I didn't think much of it, but after my next published puzzle, several people commented about it online.  Also, Jules Markey told me this weekend that he stopped using a middle initial after I did because he (like me) has a distinctive enough name without one.  Personally, I think Brendan should just drop the middle name if he wants to.  It'd be like when John Mellencamp dropped the Cougar.  Although, BEQ is a cool initialism.

Anyway... Friday night I had an awful time trying to sleep.  It was a bad combination of an uncomfortable bed (it didn't meet my springiness standards; it was a glorified foam pad), missing my "fall-asleep window," and being anxious for the next day.  And then I started feeling anxious because I couldn't sleep, which only made it harder to sleep, which only made me more anxious...  I think everybody is familiar with that cycle of despair -- when you glance at the clock and think, "Okay, if I fall asleep right now..." but you can't fall asleep right now, which is the entire problem!

Another thing with me is I get awful cottonmouth when I drink, even just a few drinks, so I pound a bunch of water, and then I have to get up and go to the bathroom all night.  It's irritating when it's just me, and it's absolutely awful when I'm rooming with noted crossword puzzle editor Mike Shenk.  (By the way, I was rooming with noted crossword puzzle editor Mike Shenk.)  I did eventually fall asleep, around 5:30 am, which got me a good three hours -- not ideal but enough to function with the right mix of caffeine and adrenaline.  And when I asked Mike in the morning, he said he didn't even notice me stirring, so either I didn't bother him, or he had the decency to lie to me.  I'll take it either way.

After working the first session Saturday as a scorer, I got to be a referee in the ballroom the second session, since my puzzle was one of the ones solved.  It was cool.  I got introduced by Will and received a round of applause.  I snapped the selfie below between puzzles.  I appear much balder in it than I would prefer, but as my wife said, "That's just how you look now."  So it is.

My puzzle engendered a bit of controversy, as some solvers -- a nontrivial minority -- did something I never anticipated.  At first, I felt steadfastly that what they did was wrong, but after hearing some of them plead their cases, I understood the argument.  (Will's the decider, and I believe he ruled it was indeed wrong, but he adjudicated in favor of the solver in some specific cases.)  Whatever the case, I don't believe it ended up affecting the relative rankings of the top finishers in any division, which is good.  Overall, the feedback I received from my puzzle was overwhelmingly positive.  A lot of people went out of their way to tell me they liked it, which I really appreciated.  I heard a few snippy comments about it as well, but that's fine with me.  I like it actually.  It makes things more interesting if there are a few naysayers in the bunch.  I mean, if people are critical of your work, at least it shows you did something worth critiquing.  I'd rather have that than total apathy toward one of my puzzles.

Saturday there was another unsettling aspect to the tournament: Reports on Twitter by some women about creepy dude behavior.  One said some guy read her an unsolicited, suggestive poem he wrote (how very Garrison Keillor of him); another said she got egregiously boob-ogled.  This surprises me exactly 0%, and if it surprises you, you haven't been paying attention for the last... ever.  My life thus far has been something of a natural experiment in dude culture.  I've spent a lot of time with just about every type of dude -- liberal, conservative, jock, nerd, preppy, hipster, punk-rock, skater, frat boy, gay, straight, bi, black, white, brown, "nice" guy, d-bag, so on and so on -- and one through-line of these groups is that there are creeps in all of them.  It's not literally all men, but it's all types of men.  No matter what dude phylum you belong to, there are guys in it who feel entitled to make women feel uncomfortable for their own gratification.  So, men, don't get all sanctimoniously bent out of shape when we get called out on it -- and if you're an offender, knock it the fuck off!

And women, keep calling us out.  It works.  Nobody wants their name floated in the whisper network.  For my part, I don't think I act creepily -- at least I've never heard that from anybody -- but I've become more cognizant of how I conduct myself and what I say in certain situations.  For example, I love low-brow humor (think Jackass), so among friends I might make silly, "inappropriate" jokes.  In my younger days, I might even make them among people who aren't really my friends yet.  Now, I try not to do that.  The upside of this is that I'm much less likely to offend somebody or make them feel uncomfortable; the downside is that I deprive my company of a "brilliant" joke -- i.e., there really is no downside.  I'm not that funny, anyway.  (On a related note, is there any guy more hilariously pathetic than the take-my-ball-and-go-home guy -- Well, if women are going to get all "me too" on everybody, I guess I'm just never going to talk to a woman ever again -- to which women are surely responding, "yeah, okay, that sounds fine to us.")

Anyway... I slept fine Saturday night, if you were wondering.

The grading went quite fast on Sunday, as there was only one puzzle left.  Because I didn't compete, I didn't have a strong investment in the horse race aspect of the tournament, so I wasn't following the standings too closely, and so the biggest story of the weekend -- Erik Agard's astonishing performance -- slid under my radar until the very last puzzle.  I didn't realize how good he actually was until he crushed the finale several minutes faster than Dan Feyer (you know, Dan Feyer, the seven-time champion!).  It's difficult to overstate how impressive it was to watch in person.  And it makes me wonder -- is this just the new normal now?  Is Erik just that much faster than the field?  It's going to be fun to find out.

For my part, I have more modest solving goals, I would like to finish in the top half of the JV division of the Indie 500 with a clean slate of puzzles.  If I can do that, then I will be content.  I fancy myself much more of a constructor than a solver anyway.  Speaking of which, I have one appearing in the New York Times in the near future -- keep an eye out for it.  Until then...