Redd's Roster of Crosswordese: Do not read if you hate DRNO

I didn't know there were pictures of some of these people: https://www.xwordinfo.com/Cards?select=topcons

ALBA ALMA ALVA ELBA

Not to mention
ELLA OLLA ELEA

My times for today's puzzles were awful by my old standards. Did tomorrow's in 3:46 which is not competitive but okay for me.

Trying to turn my rise and fall in competitive solving into some kind of Behind The Music saga but it ain’t happening.

Nutshell comes back to: slowly got hooked on competitive solving, despite my wariness of it, did lots of puzzles got somewhat faster every year until one year I finished 77th, then the next year my friend stopped going with me to the tournament, my rank dropped, couldn't go to the next year's tournament because my daughter had a concert that weekendl and in the end got so burned out anyway that I couldn't even enjoy non-speed solving anymore, the thrill was gone. Still liked doing cryptics though, although hadn't done too many recently. Just did Patrick Berry's easy one in The New Yorker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWN-adiDNtM

got kinda bogged down by today’s Sunday NYT - cluing just vague enough throughout that I kept putting in wrong answers. theme was whatever. i really need to fill my days with other puzzles.

Jeff Chen’s rundown gives a little history of that type of theme.

The last Across answer in today's New Yorker crossword is DRNO

:)

So is this the new default cruciverbalist thread? If so, kudos to redd

there's another Crossword Puzzle Thread

I thought the other was the default thread, I just started this thread for the xwordese.

Why is it so bad and hated?

S
M
E R I N
E

yeah, fuck that

My heart briefly leapt that they might've meant Cork.

what are some abandoned crosswordese words? i heard that before will shortz became nyt xword editor, INEE was common fill.

Good question

struggling to work out a clue for that...

Arrow poison
Curare cousin

wow. okay

Did you think maybe it had something to do with bellybuttons?

that would be INNIE surely...

"Celebes wild ox = ENOA" was the one that made my mother stop doing crosswords entirely. She never went back.

I have a friend who got so infuriated by ERN / ERNE that she canceled her NYT subscription (back when that meant something). To this day, she's like "Don't get me started on the fucking sea eagles."

I still see it from time to time, but nowhere near the frequency it appeared in its heyday.

Also seeing some drop-off on appearances of OLEO and ALOU.

SST seems unkillable, decades after the last Concorde flight.

ERN/ERNE still getting used quite a bit these days - and don't sleep on TERN either!- although, yeah, not nearly as frequently as in the pre-WS era.

Last week saw LALAW raise its head above the parapet; they haven't given up that white upper-middle-class touchstone. Nor its inevitable cousin, DEY.

Two classics! B-b-but what about their bicoastal cousin, ESAI Morales?

ERN and ERNE each have more than 100 references in the WSE but about 500 each in the BWSE.

ALER and NLER became rare after this blog post: https://devilcross.com/2014/10/15/fill-that-must-die-alers-nlers/

wild ox is ANOA lol that's a terrible word

B-b-but how do you folks feel about ALOHA?

coming or going?

Or even ALOHAOE?

I feel like ANKARA has been absent for quite a while

there's a lot of actually kinda normal words that i feel like you never see.

AUGUR, for instance. ENEMA. NORA. you'd think they'd come in handy.

ANKARA has tapered off a wee bit but is still hanging on.

AUGUR appeared twice last year, eight times total in the WSE, ENEMA never, NORA is very common, two or three times a year at least, sometimes a half dozen, 112 times total so far in the WSE.

ALOHA actually exists outside of crossword puzzles, though; I presume it's still in regular use in Hawaii and by Hawaiians. I'm also inclined to give OREO a pass because people really do buy and eat them, in this century.

Not so OTT, ERNE, ALOU, OLEO, SST, ASTA. It's not just that they're dated references; they're largely mid-20th-century references, and rooted mostly in U.S. Eastern Seaboard culture to boot. To me, the world of crosswordese has its lexical center in the Manhattan of maybe 1959.

Also. Unless you are a meteorologist or are extremely interested in reenacting historical methods of maritime navigation, you have no need for NNE, SSE, NNW, etc. If I understand correctly, a serious mariner nowadays would prefer the precision of using the numerical compass bearing. Like, you're more likely to say "202 degrees" than "South-Southwest." Happy to be corrected if that's wrong.

I see a fair amount of NORAS - the fact that ATTABOY is still showing up seems more inexcusable.

OTT has a newfound importance to me because of my Duolingo Hungarian, but yeah.

7 ATTABOYs in the WSE, including one by the XWORD JESUS himself!

oh man i didn't even think about 'sleepless in seattle writer' or what have you, duh. you could also go with 'neither a borrower ___ lender be' i suppose. i guess i missed them.

There are tons of different clues, the most common being a variation on "Author Roberts."

I will stan for ALOU, not just because I was a Giants fan, but because it's also a multi-generational baseball family from the Dominican Republic that helps balance out all the times that OTT appears. Furthermore, at least one member was active in baseball through 2008.

the current manager of the mets is actually an alou

puffins that hate erns, typical

I am sick of all variations on MST/CDT/DST, mostly because I can never remember which is standard time and which is daylight savings

Don’t forget EDT!

or GMT/GST - just had the latter in the NYT Sunday