Are you familiar with the word SESQUIPEDALIAN? It was the answer yesterday at 15A and spanned the entire grid. The clue was “Having many syllables.” So it’s self-descriptive, unlike “monosyllabic.” It was the theme for the puzzle, which also had OBSTREPEROUSLY right below it, clued with “In a noisy and unruly manner.” But the puzzle’s showpiece was a 28-letter word that spanned the grid twice, with the second half right below the first. It was our old friend ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM. The clues were (53A) “Opposition to the removal of …” (57A) “… state support from the church.” I was familiar with the word from childhood, but never knew what it meant.
Getting back to sesquipedalian, the prefix sesqui means one and one half, so, e.g., sesquicentennial means 150 years. Sesquipedalia means a foot and a half long, and Horace, the Roman poet, cautioned young poets against using words a foot and a half long: sesquipedalia verba.
No doubt you’d like to hear it used in a song lyric. OK.
One commenter noted: I had always thought that pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was the longest English word, but after checking Google it seems it was a word made up in 1935 by Everett Smith, the president of the National Puzzlers League.
Smalltowndoc chimed in:
The world of medicine is often accused of creating unnecessarily long words, but I’m pretty sure “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” isn’t one of them. We call it “silicosis”.
But, “pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism”? Yeah, that’s a real thing.
Another one said: I’m happy Rex didn’t engage in floccinaucinihilipilification of this puzzle because I liked it.
Today’s puzzle at 10D was “Canine warning” and the answer was ARF. But several folks noted: “Arf” is not a canine warning. It is a canine “hello.” “Grr” is a canine warning.
I don’t speak Dog, so I don’t know what to believe.
You never know what will set someone off in Crossworld. Yesterday, at 9D, the clue was “Johnnie Walker or Jim Beam,” so I filled in WHISKEY and moved on. But it spawned much disgruntlement, e.g., this heated comment (Will is Will Shortz, of course, the NYT puzzle editor):
I call major error on the clue for 9 down: WHISKEY with an E is only used for the American and Irish versions; the Scottish and Canadian versions are spelled WHISKY. And it’s Johnnie Walker whisky, not Johnny Walker whiskey! Dammit Will, Johnnie not Johnny, plus whisky not whiskey, what a bullshit clue: go to your room and stay there! An acceptable clue for the answer would be “Jameson or Jim Beam.”
Hrummmmph!
After a good half dozen of those, I posted:
Another reason to prefer bier (or ail) to whisky — they’re easier to spell.
Wait, what?
Laura Cantrell has a very sweet voice. Here’s her song about whisky.
It was the late Roger Angell’s birthday yesterday, born in 1920. How’s this for a writer’s ancestors: he was the son of Katharine Sergeant Angell White, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, and the stepson of E. B. White. But he was mostly raised by his dad, Ernest Angell, an attorney who headed the ACLU.
Angell was married three times and had three children. His daughter Callie, an authority on the films of Andy Warhol, died by suicide in May of 2010, in Manhattan, where she worked as a curator at the Whitney Museum; she was 62. In a 2014 essay, Angell mentioned her death – “the oceanic force and mystery of that event” – and his struggle to comprehend that “a beautiful daughter of mine, my oldest child, had ended her life.”
He was unquestionably the best writer on baseball who ever lived. I would wait eagerly each November for the New Yorker issue containing his write-up on the season and the World Series. It was in 1975 that his essay “Agincourt and After” appeared, containing the following passages that start with a description of Carlton Fisk’s game-winning home run in Game Six of the Boston/Cincy World Series.
He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” fortissimo, and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them—in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all four Manchesters; and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway—jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on backcountry roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy—alight with it.
It should be added, of course, that very much the same sort of celebration probably took place the following night in the midlands towns and vicinities of the Reds’ supporters—in Otterbein and Scioto; in Frankfort, Sardinia, and Summer Shade; in Zanesville and Louisville and Akron and French Lick and Loveland. I am not enough of a social geographer to know if the faith of the Red Sox fan is deeper or hardier than that of a Reds rooter (although I secretly believe that it may be, because of his longer and more bitter disappointments down the years). What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
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The Wellington Files 