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

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

EKEBY? really? that's... not a thing, is it?

it absolutely is not

i mean....... to use language that will shortz might understand but never god forbid use..... GTFO

and like... when was the last ipod nano sold??? that’s the clue? christ

Last ipod nano was 2017.

Last SST was 2003, but it's still a popular crossword answer.

*barely audible muttering*

EKE's pretty perennial for good or ill.

EKE is overused for sure, but ‘eke out’ is at least a thing. ‘eke by’ is not

I look forward to the day when SST will be clued by "Punk label" or somesuch.

"I had trouble but i managed to eke by" sounds fine to my canadian ear.

take by, hoser

I finished today’s none the wiser how the gimmick was supposed to have worked

Me too, but I did it online so there was a cute reveal at the end.

Do you (a) care, and (b) want to know?

a) not really b) 10000% yes

SPOILAGE

SPOILAGE

SPOILAGE

The revealer is "shipshape," and if you connect the circled squares it makes a stylized sailboat. But that's not all - the theme answers each have a shape word: LOVETRIANGLE, STORYARC, SECURITYLINE, and TOWNSQUARE. The boat shape is made up of a triangle, an arc, a line, and a square.

like so

also ETS, AMI, ATEIN, PTA

Yeah. In hindsight it looks like I erred by omitting SKISLOPE from the theme answers

i thought it was something like that. i didn’t think to actually do a connect-the-dots. usually “getting” the gimmick is an aid to solving and it wasn’t this time.

ACAI

GOJI

ALOE