Among so many great word games, crosswords still reign supreme. How have they survived — and even expanded — in our digital age? What goes into a good puzzle, and will computer techniques take over? Daniel chats with author Natan Last about his book Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle.
Timestamps
- Intros: 0:35
- News: 4:42
- Related or Not: 22:13
- Interview with Natan Last: 37:56
- Words of the Week: 1:24:52
- Comment: 1:53:37
- The Reads: 1:55:31
- Outtakes: 2:02:50
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Video
@becauselangpod What's a forcing party? Hear this episode: https://becauselanguage.com/128-across-the-universe/
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Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
This time we are ordering names by how crosswordy they are. Some letters are over-represented in crosswords (like A, L, P, R, and S) and some are under-represented (like F, H, T, and W). Scores for every letter can be found here:
New York Times Crossword Analysis
https://medium.com/@m_sch/new-york-times-crossword-analysis-7aa2f64a1c6f
Your name score goes up or down, depending on whether the letters in your name are more or less likely to appear in crosswords.
Very crossworthy
- Ariaflame: 13.3
- gramaryen: 10.1
- Lyssa: 10.0
- Laura: 9.3
- James: 8.3
- Elías: 8.3
- Ayesha: 7.2
- sæ̃m: 7.0
- Larry: 6.6
- Joanna: 6.4
- Steele: 6.0
- Nasrin: 5.7
- Margareth: 5.5
- Canny Archer: 5.4
More crosswordy than average
- Natan is here: 4.5
- Amir: 4.5
- Colleen: 4.4
- Aldo: 4.3
- Daniel is here: 4.2
- Molly Dee: 4.1
- Stan: 4.1
- Amy: 3.6
- Rachel: 3.5
- Martha: 3.3
- LordMortis: 3.2
- Rene: 3.1
- Manú at 3.0
- Luis: 2.6
- Rodger: 2.6
- Kristofer: 2.4
- Andy B: 2.2
- Andy from Logophilius: 1.9
- PharaohKatt: 1.9
- Sydney: 1.6
- Ignacio: 1.4
- Fiona: 1.1
We’re in the ones
- Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ: 1.0
- Rach: 1.0
- Ben is here: 1.0
- Nigel: 0.9
- Sonic Snejhog: 0.8
- Chris L: 0.4
- Termy: 0.3
In the negatives
- Kevin: -0.2
- Diego: -0.4
- Helen: -0.7
- Faux Frenchie: -0.8
- Nikoli: -0.9
- Less than -1
- Mignon: -1.8
- O Tim: -2.3
- Wolfdog: -2.4
- Kathy: -2.5
- Tadhg: -2.9
- Felicity: -2.9
The lower reaches
- Tony: -3.1
- Meredith: -3.2
- Iztin: -3.9
- John K: -4.4
- Hedvig is here: -4.5
- Keith: -5.2
- J0HNTR0Y: -5.9
And our newest patrons:
- At the Listener level: Ben H
- And our newest free members: Fiona M, Mairy, Kommyl-fô, and Nicole
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Contexto
https://contexto.me/en/
Worldle
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/
We asked ChatGPT if there’s a seahorse emoji – things got a little weird
https://metro.co.uk/2025/10/09/asked-chatgpt-a-seahorse-emoji-things-got-a-little-weird-24386161/
ChatGPT turns off when asked for seahorse emoji
https://www.heise.de/en/news/ChatGPT-turns-off-when-asked-for-seahorse-emoji-10748593.html
[PDF] Goldberg & Shirtz: The English phrase-as-lemma construction: When a phrase masquerades as a word, people play along
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/24/article/962899/pdf
Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle by Natan Last
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/723796/across-the-universe-by-natan-last/
Just Follow Directions by Matt Ginsberg
https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/daily/2008/02/03
New York Times Crossword Analysis by Noah Veltman
https://noahveltman.com/crossword/
Oreos and the Art of Crossword Puzzle Construction
https://pudding.cool/2021/01/oreo/
Expanded Crossword Name Database by Erica Hsiung Wojcik
https://sites.google.com/view/expandedcrosswordnamedatabase/home
The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict
We Talked to Pepe the Frog’s Creator About Accidentally Making the New Swastika
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pepe-the-frog-doesnt-mean-anything/
Frogs become a symbol of resistance at ‘No Kings’ after Portland tear-gas incident
https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2025/10/18/frog-costume-no-kings-portland-protester-photos/86774355007/
Why Are Sad Frogs Invading China’s Streets?
https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2023/05/why-are-sad-frogs-invading-chinas-streets/
Supreme Court Allows Unconstitutional Racial Profiling
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/supreme-court-allows-unconstitutional-racial-profiling
Justice Brett Kavanaugh and racial proxies
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/justice-brett-kavanaugh-and-racial-proxies/
Brett Kavanaugh’s Racial Profiling Apologia Is Bad and Embarrassing
https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/kavanaugh-racial-profiling-opinion-concurrence/
Nowhere to retvrn: how far-right revisionism spreads online
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/political-parties-and-ideologies/history/nowhere-to-retvrn-history-nostalgia-tradwives-far-right/
When Did The Letter U Enter The Alphabet?
https://www.dictionary.com/e/theletteru/
Friends struggling with procrastination held a ‘forcing party’ and it’s oh so brilliant
https://www.upworthy.com/friends-struggling-with-procrastination-held-a-forcing-party
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: We don’t have a ritual. At the end of every show, we go pew, pew, pew. But at the beginning of the show, we don’t really have anything.
BEN: [TRIUMPHANTLY] Gird your loins for linguistics! [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I think we could workshop that.
BEN: We’ll put that one on the maybe pile, shall we?
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First, it’s true stalwart, Hedvig Skirgård. Hi, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: True stalwart. Stalwart is to be like resistant, to be strong. Is that true?
DANIEL: That’s right. And you’re here. You’re always here. You’re getting up sometimes very early in the morning.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] I’m not always here.
DANIEL: I’ve got word games on the mind. What’s your favourite word game that you play? Do you have a favourite daily word game or daily other game?
HEDVIG: I don’t play every day, but I was playing Contexto recently.
BEN: What’s that…?
HEDVIG: Which is quite fun.
BEN: That’s the user-friendly version of Semantle, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Semantle is pretty tricky. You’ve got to…
BEN: I don’t actually… Contexto isn’t any easier, is it? It’s just presented in a way that is like nicer and more user friendly or is Contexto easier?
HEDVIG: Good question.
BEN: I remember Semantle being pretty hard.
HEDVIG: Semantle, Context… It’s hard.
DANIEL: It invites you to see the similarity between MANDIBLE and TOASTER. You’re right, that is very similar.
BEN: I get it, I get it. There’s…
HEDVIG: Both use word embeddings. I think you’re right. I think they’re essentially the same thing.
DANIEL: Secondly, it’s mostly-true-but-some-parts-may-have-been-embellished stalwart, Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben. Same question.
BEN: You didn’t ask a question, I don’t believe. We just riffed.
HEDVIG: Your favourite word game.
BEN: We did a Robin Williams. Oh, favourite word game. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
DANIEL: It was that long that Ben actually forgot the question.
BEN: That’s not hard. It could have been a three-second answer and I would have done that. I did enjoy the Mini Crossword before the evil empire that is the New York Times paywalled it. Connections, fun. I don’t mind Connections. Wordle, I actually don’t love. Like, I’ll do it, but it’s quite far down my list. I actually hew towards the non-linguistic riffs on those games. So, I really like Framed, the movie guessing game with the frames, the still images.
DANIEL: Yes. That’s you.
BEN: I really like the various geography ones as well. So, Worldle and Globle are both games I like very much.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Very cool. My favourite right now is Gisnep. It does a rather long quote, and it’s arranged in five or six different lines because it wraps around, so there they are, all the…
HEDVIG: Oh, shit. Okay.
DANIEL: So, it’s like six lines deep. And at the top of each column is all the letters you’ll need for that column.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: So, it’s not in the right order.
BEN: So, it’s a bit sudoku-y a little bit, right?
DANIEL: Maybe a little bit.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, a little bit.
DANIEL: For the purposes of our discussion, I’m going to say yes. Word games are on my mind, because across my desk came a book, Across the Universe by Natan Last. Now, if you’re not in the crossworld, you might not know who that is, but if you are, he’s a legend. He actually got a crossword puzzle into the New York Times at age 16. The youngest person to do that at the time.
BEN: Wow.
DANIEL: And he now does crosswords, but also poetry and asylum seeker advocacy. He does all of his stuff in the pages of the New Yorker and the New York Times. And the book, Across the Universe, is a tour through the history of crosswords and the future of crosswords. When I get a book like this, I try to skim it for the interview, and I couldn’t skim it because yum, yum, yum…
BEN: Oh, it’s just too good.
HEDVIG: Aww, nice.
DANIEL: …It was too yummy. So, I’ll be talking with Natan Last in the middle part of our show.
BEN: That is really exciting.
HEDVIG: Very nice.
DANIEL: Yeah. We want to give a big shoutout to our patrons. They keep the show going whether words, news, ideas, Related or Nots. But they’re also just kind of hanging out and being interesting on our Discord. So, we would like you to come and join in. You’ll be helping the show, keeping us going. Even if you’re $1 a month or $100 a month, we like you just the same or even be a free patron. Come see us, we’re patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Hey, Daniel?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I’ve got a fever.
DANIEL: Fever for what, Ben?
BEN: I got a terrible fever for linguistic news, and the only cure is you dropping some hot information in my lap. What have you got?
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: This is just weird, is that’s just become so sexual, especially like, “I have a fever,” “Hot news.” Oh.
DANIEL: Yeah. These metaphors, right? Metaphors of hotness.
HEDVIG: We’re in a sexy space.
BEN: I knew what I was doing.
DANIEL: You know what, Ben, though? There’s nothing that you can do about this fever. There is no cure because when I try to give you the linguistic skinny, the only cure is more. More!
BEN: Oh, wow. Yeah, look at him go. You really liked crude limericks when you were a kid, didn’t you? I can tell.
DANIEL: I’ll have to ask the man from Nantucket. [BEN LAUGHS] Anyway, this one is a new one from Dr Adele Goldberg of Princeton University and Dr Shahar Shirtz, published in Language. Remember, Hedvig, talking to Adele Goldberg in our episode 121?
HEDVIG: I do.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] It was so good. Well, this is the latest work from Adele, so, of course, had to devour it. Ben, you were kind of surprised by us saying that linguists don’t really know what a word is. [BEN LAUGHS] Could you just elaborate on that a little bit? Because I thought that was…
BEN: I think I might have gone on a registered trademark, Ben Mini Rant on this when that came up last time.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm, kind of.
BEN: It is always amusing to me when you find out that a field of knowledge, once you dig deep enough and get in the weeds enough, actually has some serious issues with what an outsider would assume is just like baseline agreed knowledge in that field. For instance, you mentioned that linguists don’t really have a cohesive agreement on what a word is, which to me is a bit like a doctor, or doctors generally, not really having an agreement on what cancer is really. And now, I don’t know this for sure, that might actually be true for all I know.
HEDVIG: The other day, someone was like, “Cancer is actually like a rather broad concept and maybe endometriosis is cancer.”
BEN: Yes. Like, why don’t we call endometriosis cancer? Yeah, I’ve heard that.
HEDVIG: Certain kinds of endometriosis, when they start producing their own estrogen, it’s, like, that’s what a cancer cell does. That’s cancer. Anyway, I think this happens in a lot of fields.
BEN: I agree.
HEDVIG: You get a lot of smart people in a room.
BEN: There’s no reason for anyone to be defensive here. It’s just as laypeople… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, I’m not… [LAUGHTER] I’m just… I want to turn the tables, Ben.
DANIEL: Hey, Ben…
BEN: Doctors do it too, Ben!
DANIEL: Hey, Ben. Chill it out, man. Come on.
BEN: Shut up!
DANIEL: Well, this paper is called “The English Phrase-as-Lemma Construction: When a Phrase Masquerades as a Word, People Play Along. Phrase as lemma. Now, when this says lemma, just think word, that’ll do us for now. For example, Ben, when I say that something is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, what is once in a lifetime? What part of speech would you say that is? A verb, a noun?
BEN: Once in a lifetime, I would probably have said is maybe an idiom.
DANIEL: Well, yes, it is. Yes, it is, Ben.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Would you say that it’s doing anything nouny or verby or something else?
HEDVIG: Probably.
BEN: It’s probably nouny Because it is describing the… No, sorry, what’s a describing word? Adjective. It’s adjectivey because it’s describing the nature of something else.
DANIEL: Okay, it’s doing the describing. Comes before a noun, looks kind of adjectivey, kind of. No, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Well, it could also just be another noun because we have compound nouns in English you can say like a horse girl. Horse is not an adjective.
DANIEL: A leather jacket.
HEDVIG: A leather jacket, etc. So, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity… I also would say once in a lifetime, I’m not sure it qualifies as an idiom because you can take it apart by its parts and it means what it means.
DANIEL: That’s true. Well, we have talked about lots and lots of phrases like this that sort of masquerade as words. For example, MARRY-ME chicken dish. We’ve talked about BOTHSIDESISM. We’ve talked about a lot of these. So, this paper describes these as a phrase, as a lemma. It’s a phrase that behaves as if it were a simple word.
So, here’s what are the contentions of the paper. They argue that we can’t shoehorn them into other categories like nouns and verbs because they don’t have the same distribution as adjectives. For instance, they don’t act the same as adjectives. They use an example, here we go. Stephen Colbert in a show, there was a story about how Salma Hayek’s owl coughed a rat hairball on Harry Styles. I guess that was a thing that happened. Told the story on Stephen Colbert’s show.
And Colbert said, “Meanwhile, in Salma-Hayek’s-owl-coughed-a-rat-hairball-on-Harry-Styles’ news.” He was able to do the joke better than I could. But the paper says “he treats the event of the actress’s owl coughing up rat hairballs on the singer songwriter as if it were familiar enough to be a lemma, named by a word.” It’s like when I do it that way, instead of saying it as a sentence, I’m using it a phrase as a lemma. And then, I’m inviting you to pretend that this is common enough to be a thing. I’m making it a thing. I’m making fetch happen.
HEDVIG: Well, you’re talking to your audience who listened to that story at some point. So, you know that they heard it. You’re not making fetch happen. You know that fetch is already in the waters.
BEN: I wonder though, I reckon you could do it the other way around. I reckon if you are a good performer, I think a person like Stephen Colbert, who I have a lot of performance respect for, could probably lead the story. Like, he could pivot from one story to another and turn to a different camera and be like, “Meanwhile, in Salma-Hayek’s-owl-coughs-a-rat-hairball-on-Harry-Styles’ news,” and then just basically repeats that, “Salma Hayek’s owl coughed a hairball on Harry Styles.”
DANIEL: I think that’d be more Norm MacDonald’s thing, wouldn’t it?
BEN: Yeah, possibly. You’re right.
HEDVIG: Yeah. This brings me back to the fact that like if I had endless money funding wise and got to do anything I wanted, I think comedy is under research because they’re doing funny things with presupposit… Common ground.
DANIEL: Presupposition.
HEDVIG: Turning things up and turning it around and like…
BEN: Comedy is so tough as well. Like, there’s so much to analyse.
HEDVIG: There’s so much to analyse, but I mean we kind of know what they… I don’t know how much you can… I would like to write something about something that’s new and I don’t know if saying comedians play with words in a funny way is super new maybe, but it’s so cool. I want to know how they do it. And I also think they don’t know.
DANIEL: Let me get to some of the findings of this paper. First of all, when you pick up a phrase and use it as a lemma, they say they’re treated as known as a known entity, even if they’re not, which makes them kind of funny. So, if I say, “Oh, I can see that we’re up to the cleaning-the-fridge stage of work avoidance.” Now, I’m treating that like it’s a known thing and it’s funny and it works.
BEN: It works. Yeah, 100%.
DANIEL: It presumes that we share some common knowledge together, which is another thing that we love to do with language. I know you and I share a thing, right? And in fact, they even did some work to show that people judge these high-frequency phrases as lemmas, phrases as words, as implying more common knowledge, as being wittier and being more sarcastic than if you had just gone ahead and used the phrase or the sentence in the regular way.
They also mention British drunkonyms. Now, we’ve talked about drunkonyms may be before on the show. The thing where you say, like, as long as you say any sort of noun… you can say any sort of noun, as long as you preface it by saying, “I was totally…” So, look around you and name an object in your house right now.
BEN: I was totally videogame controlled.
DANIEL: I was spaghettied.
HEDVIG: Well, that’s an actual word.
DANIEL: I was totally spaghettied, I swear to Zeus.
HEDVIG: I was totally scarfed.
DANIEL: I was totally scarfed, right?
BEN: Yeah, yeah, I get it. I was totally mattressed. Yep.
DANIEL: And for some reason, it doesn’t matter what the noun is, that construction is already set up in the “I was totally” part and then you can just go ahead and do it. So, I think that this paper says a lot about the constructionist view. The idea that we have constructions in language, these bits of our repertoire that we can sort of pick up and use. These phrases as lemmas are constructions that we can just go ahead and use in different ways. They’re not nouns, they’re not verbs, they’re not adjectives. They’re phrases as lemmas. They act differently, and this is an interesting look at how we understand words and how we understand what someone’s doing when they do what we don’t expect.
HEDVIG: I feel like English does this a lot. I wonder how true it is for other languages, but.
DANIEL: They do give some non-English data as well. So, we’ll slap up a link to the paper on our show notes for this episode, becauselanguage.com.
HEDVIG: And I notice as well that it looks like the PDF is available for free, which is very…
BEN: Yay.
DANIEL: Yay for open access.
BEN: Everyone’s favourite.
DANIEL: Now, have you ever thought that there was an emoji that existed and then you found out that it didn’t?
BEN: Oh, this is like a Mandela effect for emojis.
DANIEL: Yes, it is. Mine’s binoculars.
HEDVIG: But I have also found that some user interfaces will only show me some emojis also.
DANIEL: Really?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Well, certain… like, it’s funny, right? So, I only noticed the other day that Outlook has its own suite of Microsoft-specific emojis.
HEDVIG: That too.
BEN: When you put it into… Which then makes me wonder, okay, maybe they haven’t replicated all of them. So, maybe that’s something that you’re encountering, is they have like a reduced library or something.
HEDVIG: Well, sometimes if you’re on Discord on the phone, for example, and you’re typing a message and you click on the Discord symbol for emojis and you look through those emojis, you get a slightly… You both get the like Discord server stuff, but even for the regular emojis, I don’t think it’s the same as when you go to your keyboard and you click the emoji.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: I’ve never experienced this, because I have used… I would describe myself as a “basic bitch” when it comes to emojis. I use the six or seven that I think we would describe as broadly pan universal. Like, the smiley, the bigger smiley, the flat mouth and maybe the kissy with a wink and hearts or something like that and that’s it.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay.
BEN: So, they all exist as far as I’m aware.
DANIEL: They still do. Yes.
HEDVIG: They’re very common.
DANIEL: Now, has anyone heard of the seahorse emoji? Do you remember back in your mind seeing a seahorse emoji back there?
HEDVIG: Maybe. There’s a lot of animals. There’s like…
BEN: I find as well, I don’t know if you experience this, Daniel, but here in Australia, for some quite bizarre reason, seahorses… I see seahorse iconography everywhere. So, I’m also aware of the fact that I might just be projecting many, many, many, any seahorses that I have seen around the place into an emoji form. But having said that, I feel like I have seen a seahorse emoji.
DANIEL: Okay, well, you haven’t, because there isn’t one, not in the standard Unicode set.
BEN: Biscuits!
DANIEL: However, there’s a funny story from Josh Milton on metro.co.uk. It’s called, “We asked ChatGPT if there’s a seahorse emoji – things got a little weird,” so I tried it myself. I went to ChatGPT, and I said, “I think I remember a seahorse emoji. Is there one?” Can you see my screen right now?
BEN: Yes. And it’s a seashell.
DANIEL: Yes, seashell. “And you’re right. There is a seahorse emoji.” Fish! No, wait, that’s a tropical fish. Here’s the actual one.” Dragon! Nope, wrong again. Aha emoji. This one… And check out what’s going on: it does 17 iterations all the way down the page of saying, “Oh, no. Okay, I got this. The real one is…” a string of garbage emoji that aren’t relevant. “No, wait, okay, I’ll stop joking. Yes, there really is one. No.”
BEN: I have never encountered GPT interacting like this.
HEDVIG: I have never encountered doing this kind of… No. I haven’t encountered it saying, “Hold on, I got to think for a minute.”
BEN: No. And what I’ve also… One of the principal criticisms I’ve had with most large language models is that it would stop… at the front, in my experience. It would say yes, and it would give you a seashell and it would basically be like, “I did a good job.” [LAUGHS] It’s been very comfortable being wrong in all of the things that I’ve found it to be wrong in.
HEDVIG: What we wanted to do is do all of that thinking, reasoning, whatever thing that is visualising that it’s doing, and then at the end say, “I’m sorry. There isn’t one,” but we don’t want to… I want to see this.
BEN: Yeah. So, have we seen an instance of like… Are we seeing behind the curtain here? Is that what’s going on?
DANIEL: I think we might be. And I think this has interesting implications for how large language models process text. So, I think there’s a combination of things happening here. First of all, the large language model… and by the way, Claude does the same kind of thing, although it didn’t thrash for 17 iterations, it did maybe three and then stopped. But it’s got access to text where people are convinced that the seahorse emoji exists. People are talking about the seahorse emoji as if it exists because of the Mandela effect. So, that primes the large language model to say, “This must be a thing. All these people are saying it’s a thing.”
But that can’t be the whole story because I tested it on other Mandela effects, like the Fruit of the Loom logo, which many people are… Can you describe the Fruit of the Loom logo, the underwear brand in the USA?
BEN: I have no idea what it is.
HEDVIG: It’s a sort of shell from Greek mythology overflowing with fruit.
DANIEL: The cornucopia, full of fruit.
HEDVIG: Cornucopia. Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s the Fruit of the Loom logo, except it’s not. The Fruit of the Loom logo has never had a cornucopia. It’s never had a horn of plenty thing with all this stuff coming out. But many people are convinced that it once did, and it never did. But when I asked ChatGPT and Claude about this, they both say, “Oh, no. That’s a straightforward Mandela effect. That’s not how it was.”
BEN: Interesting. But is that because there’s not enough information about the seahorse effect? Sorry, the seahorse emoji.
DANIEL: Maybe because there aren’t enough websites that talk about, “No, this is not a thing,” because there are a lot of Mandela emoji. The binoculars, the vacuum. Also, I tested it on the Monopoly guy. What’s the Monopoly guy look like? You know the game, Monopoly? He’s an old guy with a…
HEDVIG: Hat and a monocle and a mustache.
DANIEL: He’s got a hat, he’s got a monocle, and a mustache, except one of those three things he doesn’t have.
BEN: Yeah, he doesn’t have a monocle.
DANIEL: He doesn’t have a monocle. And if I ask ChatGPT, am I freaking anybody else out here? Okay, fine.
HEDVIG: Well, I just asked my ChatGPT about the seahorse and it went on… It never stopped. But then, I asked something else I know is untrue, and it gave an answer, it stopped.
DANIEL: Just gave an answer. That’s what happened with the Monopoly guy.
HEDVIG: It’s almost as if there’s like a… You know how Google hard-coded in, like, what’s the meaning of life? 42.
BEN: Right, right.
HEDVIG: It almost feels like someone has…
BEN: What I’m wondering is if this is in some way related to… I’ve noticed that all of the things that you said, Daniel, are in some way visual.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Does it look like this?
HEDVIG: They’re visual.
BEN: Does it… Like, all of them. If you ask ChatGPT, “How do you spell the Berenstain Bears,” one of the more famous Mandela effects, I imagine it’s going to spit out either the correct answer or the wrong answer very, very quickly. Are we encountering an issue with a large language model fundamentally not having any visual acuity whatsoever? So, all it can do is approximate based on what it has found in the corpuses of text that it has been trained on?
DANIEL: Yep. The fish emoji doesn’t look like a fish emoji to a large language model. It looks like a space in the Unicode directory. And also, those emoji are scattered around in discussions, but the emoji being used has sometimes a tenuous connection to the actual words themselves because they are functioning as tone indicators or sometimes gestures, their meaning is a bit obscure. So, I think the fact that this is about emoji is contributing to the confusion. It thinks that it can pull something out because people talk about it as if it’s real. But then when it tries to do so, it spits out weird, random things and it can’t see them. It can’t see the little pictures.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: And the text that it’s trained on doesn’t give much clue about what it is. So, I think this is a fascinating little insight about large language models and emoji.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: There you go.
HEDVIG: And I think you’re right. There’s something specific about emoji, not just other visual cues, because I just asked it, like, “Is the Doctor Who telephone box red?” And there’s lots of people in fanfiction and whatever writing about it and describing it as blue. So, it knows that it’s blue. It knows to associate those words. So, it’s something very particular to emoji.
DANIEL: Is it blue?
HEDVIG: That’s cool.
BEN: It is blue, yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s blue.
DANIEL: It’s blue, okay. And now, it’s time for Related or Not. [SCATS]
BEN: Which one have we got this time?
HEDVIG: Okay, I’ve got pen and paper.
DANIEL: I don’t know. What do you want? I don’t know.
BEN: We need some fresh ones. We need to put the call out. We need some sick new… Here’s what I want, I want a jungle Related or Not intro song. If someone out there can bring me like a [SINGING] Related or Not like that kind of thing?
DANIEL: We’re leaning away from AI though, because it’s stolen data.
BEN: No, I’m asking people to go and make it on some kind of little free loops or…
DANIEL: We’ll play it. We’ll play it.
BEN: For sure.
DANIEL: Okay, well, this one comes to us from duckoffawatersback on our Discord.
BEN: Great name.
DANIEL: PharaohKatt on our Discord. And also, James on our Discord. It’s all happening around here. These are three pairs. Two of them are related, one of them is not. You’ve got to pick the distraction. Here we go.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: ANGUISH and LANGUISH.
BEN: Mm, mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: ANGUISH, LANGUISH. So, ANGUISH is to have anxiety. And LANGUISH is to be lazy, languor about, move slowly.
DANIEL: I feel like LANGUISH, yes, there’s a bit of lassitude involved in languishing, but it could be bad. It could be like If you’re languishing, it’s never good.
BEN: Yeah, it’s definitely a negative valence. I’ve always thought of it, like, in relation to boats for some reason. Like, sailboats would languish if there was no wind and that sort of thing.
DANIEL: And then, ANGUISH which is a feeling of desperation and sadness. Okay, that’s one. Second, EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE. And for this one — because clearly the EX- is related. These are both Latinate — I want to focus on the -PER-. Or the -PERT-. That’s the part I’m interested in for this one.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And third from James, CAMARADERIE and CAMERA. CAMARADERIE, which is friendship and well-being. And CAMERA, the little clicky device that we have on our phones, but a real one. Okay, so those words again. Here are the three pairs. ANGUISH and LANGUISH. EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE. CAMARADERIE and CAMERA. Two of them are related to each other, but the third one’s a distraction. Which one?
BEN: Oh, I’ve got a gut feel on this one. I reckon ANGUISH and LANGUISH are related. It just seems too French for it to not just to be le anguish.
DANIEL: Oh, I see what you mean.
BEN: And then, some English people being, like, [IN A BRITISH ACCENT] “They spelt it LANGUISH.” [DANIEL LAUGHS] So, one came over at one stage and then another one came over at another stage.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: I actually think our little EX- pals are the false friends here. What was it? EXPERIENCE and…
DANIEL: EXPERTISE.
HEDVIG: EXPERTISE.
BEN: …EXPERTISE. Yeah, I reckon they’re not friends because I have a feeling, again with French, that when the Renaissance men and women of the early days of photographic technology were doing that sort of stuff, the word they used for the device could in some way be related to friend or friendly or friendship or something like that. Okay, that’s my… So, the ex’s are the sneaky devil.
DANIEL: I feel like PER- and PERT-, I could see how those would be different somehow, yep. Okay, so you’re going for EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE. Hedvig, which one are you going for?
HEDVIG: This is a really hard one. I think you pulled together really fun examples. So, I’m also on the ANGUISH and LANGUISH are related train. But I think it’s one of those pairs, like willy-nilly. Like, they’re actually opposite pairs or used to be at some point.
BEN: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: And then the thing about EXPERTISE and EXPERIENCE is that because you hear the EX-, but if you look at the -PERIENCE and -PERTISE, the thing is quite small that’s similar, actually, and it could be chance. The thing about CAMARADERIE and CAMERA, for English, CAMARADERIE, CAMERA, the first vowel is different. So, I feel like it’s some sort of loan. Is COMRADE a loan from Germanic or slang?
DANIEL: French. I feel like it’s a…
HEDVIG: …raderie, yes, but CAMERA is to do with shutters, right? It’s to do with closing?
BEN: Oh, interesting. I’m not sure. I don’t actually know the etymology.
HEDVIG: It’s to do with the room.
BEN: I thought it was room, yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s room.
DANIEL: It’s a little tiny room with a shutter.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: It opens.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. I’m having… You know when you have a thought and you articulate it at the same time as you’re having it. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You’re having that feeling, like when you know two different parts of the city and then you find a road that joins them, and you’re like, “[GASPS], I didn’t know these two parts go together.”
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or when you’re in a city and you’ve been taking the subway all the time, the metro, and then you realise that places are connected above ground. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: There is an upworld.
HEDVIG: There’s an upworld. Yeah. Okay, it’s really hard. EXPERIENCE, EXPERTISE or CAMARADERIE, CAMERA. I think CAMARADERIE and CAMERA are the false pair.
BEN: Okay, that’s good. Different for me.
DANIEL: I think, for me, this is interesting because we’re all three different, because I thought ANGUISH and LANGUISH…
BEN: Ooh, there’s going to be a winner. This is great.
HEDVIG: Really? Oh, my god.
DANIEL: I know that in musical directions, if it says langsam, it means sad because that’s German. Or is that slow? No, it’s sad. And then, ANGUISH…
HEDVIG: No, it means slow.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s it. And then, I thought ANGUISH is related to ANGST. I just thought, yeah, that peels apart into two different things that I know about, sort of. So, I’m saying those are the distraction. And the answer is, I was right! ANGUISH and LANGUISH are the distractions.
BEN: Ugh, worst possible outcome.
DANIEL: Latin angustia is tightness or difficulty. And then, Latin languēre is to be weak or to faint. Two different words.
BEN: Ah, they’ve come together. English has just like bleh-ed them together.
DANIEL: That happens a lot.
BEN: Like the different coloured Play-Dohs in the hands of a toddler.
DANIEL: As far as EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE, that PER- or PERT-, they’re both Latin peritus, meaning experienced or test. It’s a thing that you’ve been through. And, Hedvig, you are quite correct. CAMERA is a room. So, James says they are in fact related. CAMARADERIE comes from COMRADE, which comes from someone who sleeps in the same room, or your chamber mate.
BEN: Ah, fun.
DANIEL: And then, it goes back to Latin camera, a little vaulted room, which gives us the box that captures a moment in time. The device you might whip out to document moments of camaraderie. [LAUGHS]
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: There we go. Jinx. Now, second one, people often misspell these two words. They spell LOOSE and LOSE the same sometimes.
BEN: Ah, yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Related or Not? LOOSE and LOSE.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Yep. Are they related?
BEN: LOOSE and LOSE.
DANIEL: LOOSE has two O’s and LOSE has one.
BEN: Tricky.
DANIEL: I say not related.
HEDVIG: No. I say not.
BEN: Well, I have to go related then. Screw you guys.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: And I’m going to justify it, even though I didn’t have any reason to. I think semantically there’s a connection there. When you loosen something, you lose… it’s the quality that it had before, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yep.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
BEN: So, that’s where I’m sitting with that. It’s tenuous.
DANIEL: If it gets loose, it might get away and then you lose it.
BEN: Yeah, basically.
DANIEL: Yeah. I said no because I just thought, nah, those two words feel like super old Germanic, and I can see how they would accidentally grow together but be really different.
BEN: All right, and?
DANIEL: Up to Hedvig now.
BEN: Oh, she said no.
HEDVIG: I also guess that they’re not related simply because I could match one of them to a Germanic root and the other one not. And I thought English is like borrowing something or doing something strange.
DANIEL: Okay, so we have one vote for yes and two votes for no. Answer, no, they come back totally different words. Old English losian is where we get LOSE from, to be lost or to perish. And then, LOOSE comes from Old Norse lauss, among other places. I just thought it was interesting that they look so similar. I mean, lose has one O, loose has two. But if we look at the forms, if we click on the forms tab in the Oxford English Dictionary, we see the word LOSE written with two O’s, sometimes in the 1500s, 1600s, and we actually find LOOSE written with one O in the 1500s. But now, we pretty much settled on LOSE and LOOSE, one O, two O’s, respectively.
BEN: What a frustrating time to be alive.
HEDVIG: But, Ben, I’ll give you that… If this wasn’t in the game setting and I wasn’t also thinking about game mechanics, I don’t know what I would have answered, because they are really similar. And I think that if there’s anything we’ve proven with this segment, Related or Not, over many episodes, it’s that you can work your way to a connection or to a not connection with a lot of these pairs. It’s hard work.
BEN: You can justify a crazy amount of bullshit.
DANIEL: It is true.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you can justify a crazy amount of bullshit. And sometimes, the semantic string that holds an actual reconstruction together appears very loose and this is why… ha-ha-ha, I did say it.
DANIEL: And that’s when you lose.
HEDVIG: That was unintentional. It’s just primed. But that is why historical linguists use more than isolated pairs. That’s why they don’t do this.
DANIEL: All right, last one. This one’s different. A different challenge that I wrote. I looked at the word, UPHOLSTERY. You know, when you reupholster a couch, it’s the way that the leather is arranged on a couch or a chair, upholstery, which of these words is it related to? Okay, is it HOLSTER, like a gun? You stick a gun in a holster. LUSTER: shiny and velvety. POLE? or UPHOLD? Is UPHOLSTERY related to HOLSTER, LUSTER, POLE or UPHOLD? I won’t guess on this one.
BEN: Okay. I think I’ve got my answer on this, but I want to give Hedvig first right of refusal, because if she picks one, I’ve got to pick another one. There’s no fun if we’re both right or both wrong.
DANIEL: It might be fun.
HEDVIG: I mean, why on earth wouldn’t it be UPHOLD?
BEN: That’s what I… Oh, damn it. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Like, it has to be. I’m sorry.
DANIEL: Why does it have to be? What’s the relationship?
BEN: That’s exactly where I went. Because UPHOLSTERY is doing that. It’s upholding the fabric to whatever structure you are upholstering.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: That’s my thinking there. Like, you take fabric and foam and whatever else, which is notoriously very loose and flowy and not very good at staying on things, and then you use all sorts of wizardry like glues and tacks and stuff to keep it in a particular shape for many, many years.
DANIEL: Uphold it.
BEN: You uphold it. Yeah, that jumps straight out at me. But I can’t choose that, so I’m going to go with POLE.
DANIEL: Okay. [LAUGHTER] That was the most distract of the distractor answers that I could come up with, but okay. You didn’t like HOLSTER.
BEN: That was the second most relevant to me in the list. The only reason I didn’t think that it would be that is, I don’t know if this is a D&D thing, maybe you thought this as well, Hedvig. Given my fantasy knowledge and just general sort of interest in the ye olde days, leather workers and upholsterers were very different things and very different trades. And holsters were almost universally made of leather.
HEDVIG: Really?
BEN: Yeah, being a leather worker was a very…
HEDVIG: I grew up with a leather couch.
BEN: Okay. Fair, fair. I think that’s much more recent though. And upholstery is a concept with fabrics… I don’t know. Anyway, that’s just what I thought.
DANIEL: Okay, here’s the answer. It is UPHOLD. You are upholding…
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: …keeping something from falling into disrepair.
BEN: Oh, shit, I got it wrong. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I mean, it’s what you wanted to guess. It was too contrary.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Sorry. It’s what you wanted. That’s right. So, the relevant sense of UPHOLD for UPHOLSTERY, the way that they’re related, is that if you kept something from falling into disrepair, you kept it up. You were upholding it. You were an upholdster, -STER meaning someone who does a thing. However, if you take a look at Etymonline, Douglas Harper also mentions that it might be a slightly different sense. An upholdster might be not somebody who upholds furniture and keeps it from falling into disrepair, but rather somebody who undertakes or carries on a business. You are upholding some kind of enterprise.
BEN: Wouldn’t that then be a word for every sort of business?
DANIEL: It could have been at first, but then it focused on that one.
BEN: Ah, okay.
DANIEL: In the same way that UNDERTAKER did. It used to be that UNDERTAKER was somebody who undertook a business, but because of taboos about death, we didn’t want to say, “This person is a person who buries people.” We would say, “Well, this person engages in undertakings.”
HEDVIG: That makes sense.
BEN: So, this would be, like, if we in a hundred years only use the word ENTREPRENEUR for people who bury dead people.
HEDVIG: Wait, we do this. Hey, wait, wait, stop. Entrepreneur is not any business.
BEN: Isn’t it? I’m lost.
HEDVIG: Entrepreneur is like specifically annoying startup people who are trying to do something new and disrupt business. That’s what an entrepreneur is.
DANIEL: She’s right, you know.
BEN: I don’t think that’s true.
HEDVIG: Or it’s a hardworking immigrant. Yeah, it’s one of those two.
DANIEL: You know what? I’m into this.
BEN: I think we are applying some very contemporary judgments to a word that didn’t mean that.
DANIEL: No, I’m into this though.
HEDVIG: No, but I’m talking about what it means now.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: These are the meanings that have attached themselves to the word now. Yes, annoying startup guy or hardworking immigrant.
HEDVIG: Hardworking immigrant who sells doner.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s quite interesting.
HEDVIG: And GIG WORKER is people who are biking for Uber Eats.
BEN: Okay. The gig economy. Yep.
HEDVIG: That’s a gig. Or a band. This is fun! These are fun pairs!
BEN: Yeah, I was about to say, like, they’ve taken that from the music world.
DANIEL: What a great word.
HEDVIG: Annoying startup guy and immigrant hard worker or someone who is biking to deliver food or playing music. These are really funny pairs.
BEN: What’s interesting as well is I don’t think the people who are engaging in the gig economy describe the discrete units of what they do as gigs, whereas a musician does. They will talk about “the gig I have on Saturday” or whatever. But I don’t think that the Uber drivers say, “Oh, I’ve got a gig from the airport,” or whatever. They just say…
HEDVIG: No, but they would say, “My gig is Uber Eats.”
BEN: Maybe. But then, musicians don’t say, “My gig is playing music.”
HEDVIG: No. So, they’re referring to it slightly differently. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’ve got a gig.
BEN: Anyway.
DANIEL: Well, fascinating stuff. Thanks to everybody for those words. And if you have a Related or Not pair you’d like to give us, go ahead and do that in all the regular ways, hello@becauselanguage.com, or on our socials.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I’m here with Natan Last, who contributes crossword puzzles to the New Yorker and the New York Times among others. He’s formerly director at the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. At one time, the youngest person to get a puzzle accepted into the New York Times, which is pretty impressive. And he’s the author of Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. It’s Natan Last. Natan, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with me on the show today.
NATAN: Thanks for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure.
DANIEL: You have just come back from Crossword Con, which I’ve never been to. What was the vibe there? What would I have seen if I were there with you?
NATAN: Crossword Con is this awesome group of people that kind of showcase all the different ways crosswords tickle everyone’s brains. So, there’s programmers showing the bespoke tools they’ve built to make puzzle making easier. I did a reading there of a more emotional section in the book, trying to talk about the ways that crosswords bring people together and even unite us in moments of grief. And there were people there talking about crossword archive digitization, talking about the indie puzzle scene and the charity puzzle packs. It’s just like a really great, multilayered cake cross-section of the puzzle world. It’s really wonderful.
DANIEL: How do crosswords bring us together in grief?
NATAN: [LAUGHS] I have this chapter in the book about a pair of siblings whose mother, unfortunately — this is right at the start of covid — was diagnosed with cancer. And they came back to New York where she was being treated. And even in the big hospital room that was in a new NYU unit, it had a big TV. They plugged in their laptop and they did the Times puzzle every day. And a streak began and the streak kind of seemed to hold the possibility of her illness going away, the possibility of her life continuing. And it was just a way to mark the day, to collaborate. And for the mother who unfortunately passed, to see her children doing something together and to help.
DANIEL: It’s important to play together, isn’t it? And this is one way for people to play.
NATAN: Yeah, exactly. It’s traditionally an isolated pursuit, but now puzzles have become just like sharing our Wordle grids, a very social thing.
DANIEL: That’s a really good point. And the sociality of it, the digitisation of crosswords makes it possible or easier to share, that’s for sure. Because of something I read in your book, Across the Universe, I decided to try out a puzzle that you referenced. It was one by Matt Ginsberg. The title of it is Just Follow Directions, and it’s from the 3rd of February 2008. We’ll have a link to it on the show notes for this episode.
And I haven’t experienced anything like that for quite a while. I have a habit of doing the Mini in the New York Times with my young daughters and they’re just getting used to crosswords and they’re getting a vocabulary. It’s a way for us to build vocabulary and a way for us to sort of work together to solve a problem, which is really cool and it’s cool that crosswords can do that.
But this puzzle was just bananas. It’s got words flying around everywhere. It’s got ambiguous clues. It’s got clever clues. The one that I think I noticed was “punch”. And I love clues like that because you don’t know if you’re talking about punching someone or punching a ticket, like punching a hole in something, or whether you’re talking about punch that you drink and it’s [LAUGHS] four letters long, and I’ve got to think, I’ve got to sort through all that ambiguity. So, writing an ambiguous clue I think is part of the fun. But what else is fun about writing clues for you?
NATAN: Yeah, clues are this wonderful free associative game. The novelist, Georges Perec, who is a big language head and of course famously wrote a novel without the letter E in it, also wrote a weekly crossword for Le Point and called the filling the grid, this like letter-based arithmetic. It was like this tedious, maniacal task where all that matters is that letter, words of this or that length. But filling a grid was a stroll in the 1001 associations a word can evoke.
And writing a good crossword clue is like that. At first, just letting your mind go to where it wants to go when it comes to what’s evoked by a given word. But writing a really good clue… So, there’s the cultural reference point, there’s what does this make me think of? And that first instinct is often the truest clue you’ll write. But there is also clever clues and that is honestly replayed in the game, Codenames, where you are looking at a word and you just are thinking of all of these kind of abstract nouns and verbs that are associated with that word. So, I was recently helping a friend write a clue for the word “Make out session,” that phrase.
DANIEL: “Make out session”. Okay, cool.
NATAN: And we wanted a clever question mark clue. And sometimes…
DANIEL: A question mark. Hang on, for people not familiar with the syntax, that means it’s a jokey answer. Is that right?
NATAN: Yeah. There’s a pun involved. There’s wordplay involved. And in this case, like many previous crosswords, I wanted to pun on the fact that making out is sometimes referred to as necking and so I just thought of as many two-word phrases as I could that had the word NECK in them and eventually came up with “Neck stretch,” which sounds like something your physical therapist recommends, but it’s also a stretch of necking.
DANIEL: Stretch of time.
NATAN: Exactly. And that kind of free associative hopping is I think what makes for really good, clever clues. The question mark, as you’re saying, is often a way of hand-holding the solver just a little bit and saying, “There’s stretchy wordplay involved herein. Be careful.” But also, you can, just like you’re saying, use the bare syntax of crossword clues to hide proper nouns. So, a clue might be something like “Law with many parts,” which sounds like it’s about some kind of ancient code of legal authority. But in fact, the answer is Jude, because Jude Law is an actor whose last name would be capitalized at the beginning of the clue, and actors have parts.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay.
NATAN: Yeah. It’s that kind of groaners that really make us crossworders tick.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. And you know the word NECK… I don’t know if anybody refers to kissing or making out as necking anymore, it’s an old reference. And that was kind of an area I wanted to go to since we’re talking about clueing. There are words that it’s maybe time to retire. Like Nick and Nora’s dog, Asta… who knows that anymore? That’s a 100-year-old reference, you think: maybe we better move on from that one. Are there any that you feel like it’s time to retire or was there a clanger that you recently saw that made you go, “Ugh, that one has passed”?
NATAN: [LAUGHS] Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot here. I think some of the Hawaiian words for lava occasionally, or some of the placenames are places that I hadn’t heard of, I kind of think many things are true here at once. One is there’s been a happy arms race to make crossword grids even cleaner. So, even more devoid of this fusty crosswordies, as you’re referring to it and that’s definitely the term of art. These are words that appear so much more in the crossword grids than in real life.
And in fact, there was this cool analysis by software engineer Noah Veltman, that I’d quickly shout out, which is about a cross wordiness of a word. So crosswordese might be words that — like ERA, era, YEAR, AREA — appear in crosswords so often. But of course, those words appear in real life too. So, he kind of created this ratio that was, how often does this word appear in the New York Times Crossword grid, against how often does it appear in the Google Books corpus?
DANIEL: Cool.
NATAN: So, words that are only in crosswords. And the crosswordiest words are words like URSA. No one really calls the Big Dipper Ursa Major. Let’s see what else. SMEE, which is the captain, I believe from…
DANIEL: Captain Hook’s first mate.
NATAN: Yeah.
DANIEL: I was thinking of like NNE for north-northeast, which I look at that and I just, “Oh, my god.”
NATAN: That’s right. And you’re pointing to a really good thing, which is not only is it frustrating as a solver to put that in, but the frustration begins when you see yet another clue that’s two cities that happen to be north-northeast from each other in a pathway you’d never take as a traveler and so it just feels so contrived. I would say those, I definitely agree. I’d like to retire.
I think that there was this great project I talk about in my book called the Oreo Clueing Project, which recognized that OREO, of course, is in every single crossword, and we could talk about the phonotactic reasons for that. There’s good reason that Oreo is in every crossword grid, it’s helpful. But also, it’s so hard to find a good and new and fresh OREO clue. And so, almost as a joke, this comedian and crossword writer, Ada Nicolle, enlisted some 50 constructors to write dozens and dozens of new, and in many cases, cheeky clues for the word OREO.
DANIEL: Okay.
NATAN: So, things like “Edible tell in the movie Rounders,” because someone’s playing poker, and when they reach for an Oreo, they have a good hand.
DANIEL: Oh, nice.
NATAN: Or apparently, Ross and Rachel split an Oreo on the very first episode, the pilot of Friends. And so, that’s a way of trying, and who knows, if successful, to breathe new life into some of these words that just because of their letter combinations are going to keep coming up.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Well, now let me ask a question from our listener, James, because I put this out to our listeners. James has kind of a similar bend here. James says, “How do you handle curating your lexicon of available words? Is it exciting when a new brand or a new celebrity makes it possible to use a previously too obscure word as an answer? How do you balance the need to expand or diversify the kind of clues and answers that can appear in puzzles with a need to be familiar enough for enough people to solve a puzzle?” I imagine you’re just making guesses about, ‘Okay, what’s my audience know? How far can I push this? What’s their limit? How do I go a little bit beyond it so that it’s not bleedingly obvious when you first see the clue?’ Maybe, I want it so that it’s not obvious when you first see it, but once you get a couple of letters, then you go, ‘Oh, that’s the sweet spot. That’s what I’m looking for.’
NATAN: That’s exactly it.
DANIEL: How do you manage your inventory?
NATAN: Yeah, that’s exactly it. So, there’s a couple of ways to do it. Almost all constructors have this text file called a word list. And this could be paper and pen and analog. But what it often is a file that’s tens of thousands of rows of words. And then, next to those words is a number that represents how highly ranked that given constructor wants it to be in their construction software.
And all that means is if you’re in a section and you need a seven-letter word that has an N in the third position, it’ll show you regular words as well, but maybe higher up than that you want to see — to James’ point — JYN ERSO, Felicity Jones’ character in Rogue One, I remember when that movie came out, everyone was, like, crossword constructors are going ham. This is J-Y-N as a first name, E-R-S-O. And so, that’s just going to bail you out of a corner, and you have the might of Star Wars fandom behind you to say this is knowable. It’s not inferable necessarily as a name, but so many people saw that movie, so many people know this now franchise character that that’s helpful for us constructors next time we’re faced with RS, let’s say, or a seven-letter word that has an N in the third slot.
And so yeah, we’re always balancing that. You alluded to the crossings. So, one rule of thumb that I have is if I think a name is crossword worthy, I’m going to put it in. And the best thing I could do is make the crossings as easy as possible. So, the down answers, let’s say, that touch the across answer that I’m introducing, I can make those words standard vocabulary, and I can make the clues for those words as gentle as possible. And I’d rather do that than ease a solver in. I want to clue the new name I’m introducing the way that I want. If it’s something that’s important to me, I kind of don’t want to soft pedal in any way, but I can help in the crossings. I can help the solver see that a first letter is going to be a T. And if most words begin with consonants, maybe there’s a vowel or a blend afterwards, get them thinking about the logic of the grid as opposed to shaming them for something they don’t know.
And the second thing I would do is if I believe in the name, and I think it’s a really interesting thing, ideally, even in the case in which the solver maybe didn’t know the answer, maybe even didn’t finish the puzzle, hopefully I’ve excited them into learning something that they didn’t know as opposed to kind of tut-tutted that they had a gap in their knowledge.
DANIEL: Yep. Okay. Ariaflame has asked, “How iterative a process is this? Are themed ones more fun?” They’re kind of all themed now, aren’t they?
NATAN: Well, most of them are themed. There’s kind of two big puzzle types, themed puzzles, yeah, they have a connection. Most puzzles are themed. So, in the Times, for instance, Monday through Thursday are themed. Sunday is themed, just bigger. Friday and Saturday are theme-less. And so, those are just kind of mixtapes. They’re just collections of interesting words. They’re harder. The clues can be trickier. The culture can be more ranging. It’s a very, very iterative process. And all three parts of that process are really, really, really disparate in terms of what they draw on. So, making a theme is like creating a scavenger hunt, and coming up with the good answers in the puzzle that you mentioned, what’s the right illustration of that theme? How many theme answers do I want? And getting that theme idea together, getting the list of answers chiseled down into a cool set, that’s extremely iterative.
And then, placing the black squares and making the words fit is also extremely iterative. If making a theme feels like creating a scavenger hunt, and many crossword constructors who favor that part of the process will say that they are creators. Whereas people who are really, really, really grid freaks, they love the mathematics of the letter combos, they love making a grid with interesting words, in my experience, they tend to use the word “constructor” because it feels like building. And like much building, it’s extremely iterative. You replace black squares, you’ll take out words because the two crossings have led to an obscurity in the southeast corner of the grid.
And then, of course, writing clues is writing. It feels like making jokes. It feels like making cultural references. Sometimes a little narrative when two clues refer back to each other or a clue six answers down has a callback to a clue six answers up. So, it’s extremely iterative.
And I would say the first two in particular, nailing down that theme and getting the grid just right take a long time. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: I’ve written here in my notes, it seems like filling a grid with words is half the battle, but writing a good clue is the other 150%. [NATAN LAUGHS] Is that true? Do you think I got that about right? Do they get the proportions?
NATAN: Yeah, I think that sounds right to me. I think in the book I make some joke that writing clues is half trivia night, two-thirds dad joke, where it’s like… They all take really different parts of the brain. I think that filling a grid is interesting because it’s become the part that’s most amenable to computer assistance. And so, in the old days, you’d have people tearing their hair out, scribbling on graph paper and just getting frustrated. Used to have these door-stopping books called Crossword Puzzle Dictionaries. And rather than words, they had… The headings would be, “okay, in this section, we’re doing __N_B. And then, the next session we’re doing _N__B, and it was just a list of words…
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
NATAN: …that fit that letter pattern.
DANIEL: This was just begging for computers.
NATAN: This part was right. It’s like, I have a six-letter word that ends in X. You and I will come up with some good ones, but I’d like to see the full list, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
NATAN: And so, yeah, I would say filling a grid has maybe reduced to 40% of the battle. And writing the clues is now, I think, a bigger part of it. I also think you can kind of see a constructor style and voice in the clues. And so, a lot of the efforts to write interesting clues, to introduce new cultural references, to change the syntax of standard newspaper crossword clue writing, a lot of that has happened in clue writing.
DANIEL: What you’re saying now is kind of reminding me of a thread that I want to go to, and that is, whose knowledge is being represented? There’s been a real effort, as you mentioned in the book, of trying to represent a kind of knowledge that isn’t just white mainstream culture, but that touches on different ages and different ethnic groups and different cultural traditions. That sounds like that’s a really important part of the consideration when you’re choosing words and writing clues. Would that be right?
NATAN: That’s a huge part of it. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s everything from excluding parts of language and culture that maybe just are obviously seen as pejorative or derogatory in some way. Some of that’s a low bar, not having slurs, but everything all the way up to Idi Amin used to be a very common crossword answer, because I-D-I and A-M-I-N. And whether or not you want a kind of genocidal dictator in your puzzle is, of course, something we’re freshly thinking about.
But even, I tell the story in the book about having a puzzle with Anwar in it, A-N-W-A-R. And we had clued it when we submitted it. This was a collaboration, like it’s been clued every single time before as blank-Sadat…
DANIEL: Sadat.
NATAN: …the Egyptian president. The Times had changed the clue to blank-Al-Awlaki, terrorist killed in a US drone strike. And not only is that just a little dark for my…
DANIEL: Holy crap, crossword puzzle! [LAUGHS]
NATAN: Yeah. Saturday morning, I didn’t know I was opening the paper to hear about that. In fact, I was opening the international news section to hear about that and then the puzzle section, perhaps explicitly to avoid that. But also, the way the clue was framed, this was a US citizen… I’m not defending him in any way, but this was a US citizen, so it’s weird to call the drone strike American, but not the person. Whether or not he was a terrorist was something the ACLU was debating in the courts. So, wherever you fall on what was just a hot-button issue that one didn’t expect to be litigated in the art section of the New York Times, it was a sort of extreme case that brought to bear just how political the puzzle kind of always is. It’s always telling you the definitive way a thing is known.
DANIEL: I kind of just wanted to do a puzzle here, folks. [LAUGHS]
NATAN: I just wanted to do a puzzle and I wanted a little bit, if I could psychologize for a sec, to submit gently to the authority of whatever the puzzle knows and however the puzzle frames a thing. And I do think we come to the puzzle to learn about what we need to know. Constructor Laura Bronstein has a good line. “A puzzle is kind of one collection of things one ought to know to go into the world.” We solve the puzzle in the morning and having done so, we feel that we can kind of take on the tasks of the day. And so, yeah, there’s a huge consideration to not cause harm, just as there’s a huge consideration to expand especially the linguistic base, introducing new slang, not sort of tarring that slang with too many qualifiers. So, not doing the kind of Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock, “hello, fellow kids” vibe where clueing RIZZ as “charisma, in modern slang.” It’s just like the word has become so wordified, that qualifying it in that way others it. It makes it seem a little squinty.
DANIEL: I suppose.
NATAN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Still hilarious. [LAUGHS]
NATAN: It’s absolutely so funny. But that’s a big part of it, is introducing modern slang, introducing… The constructor, Erica Hsiung Wojcik, had this thing called the Expanded Name Database. And by her lights, if crosswords are going to have IRA in the grid over and over again because R is a consonant that can blend with lots of other consonants and I and A are vowels, and vowel-heavy words are very helpful. In a language where 80% of the words begin with consonants, you’re going to need those vowel-heavy release valves underneath them. And so, to her, why not have Yaa Gyasi, the author, Y-A-A, who’s an award-winning author. Michaela Coel, C-O-E-L, an award-winning writer and director. These are people that are famous in their own right and mean a lot culturally to certain communities. And it’s just a service, I think, to have those people in the puzzles.
All the more so if you actually like them. I think one thing construction has become is a bit more, as I said of a mixtape, where it’s a weird art form because you do need the other person to solve it, but also you like what you like, and putting that in the grid, I think, is often contagious. The grid can be a kind of recommendation letter for stuff you think is cool. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s a good way of thinking about it. You teach classes in crossword construction. What’s in the syllabus, if I may ask?
NATAN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, I teach kind of two sorts of classes. One is, here’s how you make a puzzle. And that is a really, really hands-on class. And it’s divided only among the different procedures in making a crossword grid. So, class one would be how do we think of a theme? And we taxonomize existing themes, oh, here are the kinds of themes where you add a letter and make a kooky new phrase. Here’s a theme where you’ve noticed that these three Dr Seuss books are all 15 letters long and that’s all we’re doing. We’re just doing the Dr Seuss tribute puzzle. And then, we brainstorm a theme set together.
Part two is I sometimes separate placing the black squares and filling the words because putting the black squares in is such an important and kind of unsung aspect of building a grid.
DANIEL: I literally had not considered. I kind of thought that came for you. I thought that was already done for you, and it’s not.
NATAN: Yeah, you have to place every single black square. And you have to place them wisely, if you can. And everything from, okay, not a lot of words end in I, so let’s not put a black square underneath an I. All the way up to most words begin with consonants, so let’s place black squares to the left and above consonants, stuff like that. So, consonants can start where it’s going across and start words going down. And then, we’ll have a whole class on filling the grid and that’s everything from the software that people use to make that a little easier. But also, where do you start? What does it mean to have a… What does a good crossword grid feel like? Does it have a ranging set of answers? Does it have interesting vocabulary? Does it kind of do that crossword thing of combining high and low? Erudite reference and groaner pun, how do we do that?
And then, we’ll spend a whole class on writing clues. And again, that too is about being sneaky sometimes and hiding words using the linguistic pyrotechnics afforded us by clue syntax. And what do we want to reference? So, when I teach this class with older folks as the students, it’s often just a fun game of: what is something that they know that I don’t know? What is a reference that I have that they’re interested in? They’ve turned me on to a lot of 1950s movies that I otherwise would maybe not have encountered. And I forced them all to watch the music video for Sisqó’s the Thong Song because we had that in a grid. And that’s intergenerational transmission. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’ve got an idea. I would like you to test me on some clues that you think are cool, but cool in different ways. Like, you mentioned that there are pretty straightforward ones. There are some obscure ones, there are some jokey ones. Would you please do a lightning round where you can just throw some at me that you think are representative of the art?
NATAN: Sure. No problem. Here’s something I wrote from a while ago.
DANIEL: Okay. I’m going to suck at this.
NATAN: [LAUGHS] “They might be put on a stretcher.”
DANIEL: They.
NATAN: They might be… And it’s nine letters long and it’s two words, four, and then five.
DANIEL: “They might be put on a stretcher.” Okay. Now, there’s a stretcher thing. That’s where you carry off injured people, but I don’t think that’s where we’re going here. What other kinds of stretchers are they? Oh, they’re TALL TALES.
NATAN: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I like that.
DANIEL: Because a tall tale is a stretcher. Did I get it? Did I get it?
NATAN: You’re right, that STRETCHER is the word that’s being punned on. It’s not in that direction, but it’s in another direction. So, what was another thing you might call a stretcher?
DANIEL: Nope, I ain’t got it. I ain’t got it.
NATAN: A stretcher might be someone who stretches, and they might wear stretchy clothes to stretch. So, the answer is YOGA PANTS, which might be put on someone who’s doing some stretches.
DANIEL: I think if I’d gotten a few of the other letters, I might have had it. That’s really good.
NATAN: Exactly, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, I love it. Oh wow.
NATAN: This is the fun thing about clues is that, of course, you would have had some of the crossings and you would have been using both the parts of your brain that’s like: Okay, what words fill this slot? And then also, you would have been trying to decipher the pun and so it’s a good combo.
DANIEL: They are stretchers. Okay, give me another one. Give me another one. Now that you know my level. You’ve taken the measure of the man.
NATAN: Here’s one of my favorite sort of sing-songy ones. “Morsel a horse’ll eat.”
DANIEL: “Morsel, a horse’ll eat.” And four letters. Would it be OATS?
NATAN: Yeah, exactly. Three letters for OAT, singular, exactly. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yay. That’s cute. No, that’s very nice, I like that. That feels good, and it’s not too tough. It makes me feel like you’re clever and that’s what you’re trying to do, so that’s good. [LAUGHS] Okay, fresh off of that success, give me one more that you think is representative.
NATAN: Do you want a really tricky one or a really hard one… or a really easy one? Those are the… Tricky or hard? Those are the two things. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I think I’m feeling kind of Tuesday-ish. I’m not feeling Friday-ish.
NATAN: How about “Article seen in many newspapers”? Three letters.
DANIEL: The article. Oh, okay. Well, now that you say ARTICLE, I’m figuring ARTICLE is the one that’s getting punned on. So, I think the article is going to be THE.
NATAN: Well done. There it is.
DANIEL: Thank you. I think I read that one in the book though because I think you stuck it in the book and I read it there, so I might have cheated, but who knows? Maybe I didn’t.
NATAN: We’ll never know.
DANIEL: I’ll never tell. Thank you. That’s really cool. Can I go back to theme of computers? Because you think that computers have kind of solved everything but the clue writing. It would help you with placement and working out a nasty corner of the grid, but it’s not as simple as that. These are tools, but they don’t do it for you. Or, have I got that wrong?
NATAN: They don’t do it for you, and I sort of think they won’t anytime soon. A funny thing about crossword writing is that it almost feels to be like some of the aspects that we might think AI is useful for, we have kind of simpler tech tools for that are perfectly fine. So, it’s not a big value add at the moment.
DANIEL: As with many AI things, actually.
NATAN: It’s overhyped a little bit. And I would say as far as AI has gotten… I look at the LLMs and it’s very fun to see them hallucinate. It feels like they’re still not like us. I do think the hallucinations have decreased.
DANIEL: They’re not like us.
NATAN: They’re not like us. Yeah, yeah. You and I are obviously real, as we all know. [LAUGHTER] But it’s definitely the case that AI has gotten better at hallucinations. What it’s not quite good at yet is semantic play. So, for instance, if I want to think of a theme, there was a theme that Patrick Berry, who’s an amazing constructor, came up with, where he noticed that the word SORE LOSER repeats every single letter except for the L. So, there’s two S’s, there’s two R’s, there’s two O’s, there’s two E’s. L is the odd one out.
DANIEL: Interesting.
NATAN: And that’s a fun thing to notice. It would be so hard to come up with other examples. That’s not the kind of search a human brain is very good at. That sort of exhaustive, going through everything in an efficient way. It’s really hard to come up with that and he was struggling, and other constructors have come up with this kind of theme, struggling to come up with other examples. But that’s a really easy Python script to work up or something. And just saying, “Search through this dictionary and unearth gems like HIPPOCRATIC OATH”, in which every single letter except for R is repeated, which is an amazing find. And I sort of think we’d never come up with that on our own. Not only that but seeing the full sweep allowed him to starting with that L of SORE LOSER, take the extra letters and spell out LEFTOVERS, right? Which is a really nice way to tie them together.
DANIEL: Oh, so good. Oh, delicious.
NATAN: Really, really fun. Really couldn’t do that without writing a teeny-tiny program to unearth these gems. AI can help you do that a little faster if you’re not a coder and so that’s a nice thing. There’s also just been this huge reaction to two parts of crossword construction. One is the way that the word list management, having this big dictionary file that’s got some words scored high and others demoted down low. Every now and then, newer constructors will kind of unplug and do the slow food version of construction, and they’ll take out graph paper and try to fill a corner by themselves, just to remember that’s its own skill. And also, to do something that feels a little active, because in extremis, the crossword construction software will say, “You want a section of this grid filled? Yeah, one across is STRONG. Two down will be OPERA” and we’re done. And you don’t want to do that. You want to fill the grid yourself and kind of pick every word. So, there’s a sense in which with filling the grid, people have tried to beat back the machine assistance.
That’s also true for coming up with a fun theme. So, AI is quite good at letter-based search. It’s pretty good at some phonological search. So, the linguist, Tom McCoy, who’s also a crossword constructor used, I think, it’s the CMU phonological corpus to come up with pairs like THOROUGH / THOREAU that are like phonemically identical but for the stress. And then, you can clue them in a silly way, so this is “Thoreau being thorough”. All that’s changed is which syllable has the stress. And that’s another one where it would be really fun to sit around and brainstorm other examples of that. It’s also quite useful to write a four-line program that just spits out a list of really cool things.
It’s also really fun to do things you think an AI couldn’t. So, two friends of mine, Adam Wagner and Brooke Husic, had this cool theme, answers in the grid were things like CRAPSHOOT, but rather than clue CRAPSHOOT definitionally, the clue was “Drat/drat”, because both CRAP and SHOOT are synonyms for DRAT.
DANIEL: Nice.
NATAN: I think another one of them was RIB ROAST, which of course we’re not thinking of as the dish, we’re thinking of as joke or tease, which is RIB, and ROAST, which is also tease. So, there are two synonyms. And semantic search, like that kind of play, AI can’t do it yet. And I’m not sort of convinced it will be able to anytime soon. That is a theme by two extremely computationally minded people. They’re both mathy, they both know how to program. What they wanted to do is just text each other, what are some synonyms we can come up with back and forth until they came up with this idea. So, there are lots of frontiers where AI is not quite good at.
You mentioned clues. I don’t actually know of people who use it for clues yet. Clue writing is one of my favorite parts. I’m a writer as well. Outside of crosswords, I write words that only go across. And so, I really, really enjoy that process. And that’s the kind of thing where, frankly, the same way I enjoy reading a long book, I wouldn’t want to outsource the process, even if the outcome was good, and I won’t. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: You’re just hitting on so many of these areas that linguists really love, like ambiguity and wordplay. The way that we don’t use language as just simply a way of requesting information or giving information, we use it as a way of showing status or as a way of building community. And crosswords do this, and language does this and I’m here for all of it.
On that note then, let me get into the social aspect. I got to ask you about Wordle. When Wordle became a thing, what reactions did you notice from the crossworld? Was there resentment or was it like, “Hey, a great new way to play”? Or what were you hearing?
NATAN: It was extremely both of those. So, I think the crossword community is pretty warm if I can paint with a broad brush. But it’s absolutely the case that you’ll have naysayers who are like, “Wordle’s too easy.” And frankly, right now, Wordle might be a little too easy after a couple years of guessing five-letter words. But just the same, you had so many people who were like, one, this is amazing. People who never did word games, not only are they doing a word game, they’re doing it every day and they’re texting their grids to everyone. A lot has been written about how the main innovation in Wordle… this is an old game, the main innovation is that narrative of green and gray and yellow that you text to your aunt who you otherwise don’t say much to.
DANIEL: I’m always trying to beat my mom. Every single morning, we’re trading them.
NATAN: It’s extremely… it brings people closer in that way. It’s a friendly bit of competition. It’s ritualized to do it every single day. And in that sense, I think the crossword world was delighted. And in fact, I think happily it hasn’t just been Wordle, there’s now… the Times has expanded its games and all of these newspapers are seeing, sometimes with that capitalist glint in their eye, of course, that word games can be not just fun, but habituating and engrossing and bring people to a site they may otherwise not have been to, keep them there, get them to read a thing. So, it’s a really funny double-edged sword because I’m personally thrilled that more people are doing word games than ever before.
Of course, covid had a big part to play there. We were all stuck at home. I think especially the crossword gave us a way to complete a task that kind of demanded intellectual labor every single day and give us that sensation of forward progress when we were literally stuck at home. And I think that Wordle and all these other games are yet introducing a just wider swath of word lovers to the pleasures and the social aspects of word games.
DANIEL: That’s something that I get from the book, is that in the 1920s, it was this thing that nobody thought was going to be big. Everyone poo-poohed it. And yet, it became massive. And it’s only become bigger in the years since, in the past century. And now, technology has a way of spreading crosswords even more than before. There’s even more available. And the human aspect of completing a crossword and sharing it with a friend, we’re still doing that. It’s almost like we haven’t changed. Humans are still humaning, I think. [NATAN LAUGHS] Do you find that this tells us anything about ourselves? That we’re still willing more than ever to spend time and money on word games? Or maybe there’s no big point to be made. Maybe it’s just supposed to be fun, and I’m thinking too hard about it. What do you reckon?
NATAN: I think you can’t think too hard about it. I think thinking too hard is always welcome. I think that there’s a lot of people in the book who would say something like, “It’s just a game and just having fun.” And that’s a politics in itself. The idea that… especially in covid, it wasn’t just that we were alone, it was that we were sacrificing ourselves at the altar of productivity and for the first time realizing that our jobs were jobs and maybe didn’t love us back as much.
And so, to do something fun and share it with people kind of felt like it was less diverting, taking us away from something and more just, yeah, part of our beings as social creatures, kind of like you’re saying, humans are gonna human, and that’s a lot of the time going to be seeking pleasure and seeking community. And word games have shown us that can be more of a part of our life than maybe we had previously thought.
I think that it’s not really a coincidence that the big, big, big moments of crossword upsurges occur during crisis. So, the puzzle is invented after World War I. America has just come back from its kind of coming of age abroad from fighting. And because of the industrialization of the war, you get this, for the first time, firm separation between work and leisure. Leisure is a concept, is a post-World War I concept.
And so, a lot of America at the time is doing kooky competitive stuff. They’re seeing who could sit on top of a flagpole for longest. They’re seeing who can twirl a hula hoop for longest. They’re seeing… Beauty pageants are invented at this time. America is playing kind of for the first time, but also, it’s playing in this rough-edged, competitive and yet goofy way. It’s kind of doing war, but at home, is playing at it.
And the New York Times in this whole era is kind of thumbing its nose at crosswords. “Comics and puzzles are unserious,” it says. It thinks America’s literally gone mad. It’s got a big piece in 1925 called “a familiar form of madness.” It’s like last year we were doing mahjong. This year the kids are doing crosswords, what’s next? And it takes World War II for the Times to give in. So, it’s Margaret Farrar after Pearl Harbor who writes to the Times and says, “I think we’re going to need a distraction.” There’s blackout hours. It’s again unprecedented moment for that generation. And the Times finally in ‘42 adopts the crossword.
And again, it isn’t a coincidence. I think that during covid, this very natural human need to play and connect to others is so, so, so underscored when all of that connection is made so difficult because we’re at home, because we’re a little unmoored in time and place.
DANIEL: I really enjoyed reading about the personalities involved. There were some familiar names. Will Shortz, of course, who I was aware of because as a teen I was an avid reader of Games Magazine in the early 1980s, so I recognised him, I recognised some other names. Did you get a sense that you were really chronicling history?
NATAN: Yeah, definitely. I think the crossword, it’s really nice to write about something that’s got a tight century. [CHUCKLES] It’s just the last hundred years. And so, I really did, I would just say from a personal point of view, thrilled to the history sections more than I think I thought I was going to. And part of that is just the trickiness of the like autoethnography of I’m writing about my friends, I was Will Shortz’s intern when I was a kid and have submitted puzzles at the Times ever since. I write about constructors who are also close friends. And that’s tricky, that I think took a long time to figure out how to be honest, be sort of research-y without overstepping.
But the history I really did love, and it just felt like crosswords in this Forrest Gump way were around at these really important moments of history that I didn’t know about. Simon & Schuster’s first book was a crossword puzzle book. That year, 3 of the top 10 bestsellers were puzzle books. Random House kind of owes its existence to crosswords because when Schuster left Boni & Liveright, this old publishing house to start Simon & Schuster, his replacement was Bennett Cerf, an old high school and college friend.
Margaret Farrar took her royalties from the first ever crossword puzzle book, that book in 1924 by Simon & Schuster, and had it invested in US Steel and Standard Oil. And so, thanks to the behemoths of the day, she was able to reinvest her dividends in her husband’s publishing house. And eventually Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a big publisher in New York, would have crossword puzzle books to thank for its existence.
So, I really, really did love the history. It taught me so much. It taught me about how newspapers were made, that like a mobile game could exist because of new printing technology. And it’s almost always a story of a new technological affordance creating a form. And so, being able to ink the grid on the newspaper is why we have crosswords. And yeah, I really, really enjoyed the history, I think, most of all.
DANIEL: And the future, are we there? Is it AI computer tools helping humans? We’re never going to lose the human, I don’t think.
NATAN: I think we’re in an interesting phase right now because we’re in a kind of second crossword craze. So, there was that moment in the ’20s that you’re talking about where people are wearing crossword print outfits and going to crossword balls and tournaments are making a name for themselves and all this fun cultural vibrancy. I think now dozens of newspapers are adding crosswords, they’re adding word games. The phone has been our new portal to word games. And so, we’re in a new mode of loving word games, doing them all the time. And there’s a bit of competition among all of these new outlets. And I think that people who come up with games that are really, really kind of handmade and curated still have an edge. It’s pretty easy to computer generate a sudoku. It’s pretty hard to computer generate a really good, let’s say, Connections as the Times has.
And so, I do think we’re in an age where at least, I guess I’m hopeful that the future will continue to be really good games made by people. I can happily report, I don’t think AI is quite coming for our jobs just yet, but that could change. Things change by the month in this era.
DANIEL: But it is very interesting to see new games being invented. It’s good to see those innovations. Like, on our Discord channel, we’re big fans of lots of different games. We’re big Raddle fans, we’re big Gisnep fans, but I feel like the crossword is going to be the sort of the anchor store, the one holding it together. Feels that way.
NATAN: I think so. I think it’s very capacious. It unites wordplay, cultural reference, mathematics of how letters go together, scavenger hunt feel of a good theme. It’s got so much to it but I think you’re right. It’s got a heavy gravitational pull and I think it will continue to.
DANIEL: The book is Across the Universe: The Past, Present and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. It’s available from Pantheon Books and I’m talking to the author, Natan Last. Natan, how can people get a hold of you or find out what you’re doing?
NATAN: Yeah, my website is natanlast.com and you can find me on social media, @natanlast.
DANIEL: Well, thanks for. Thanks for hanging out. This has been a really good chat.
NATAN: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week, and we got a bunch of them, so let’s rip through them.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: First one, PROTEST FROG. Now, maybe I should preface this. International audience, there’s going to be a lot of American rubbish in this Word of the Week because, well, there’s some shit going down, so I’ll try to keep you acquainted.
HEDVIG: [SOTTO VOCE] Hedvig googling Swedish news.
DANIEL: What’s PROTEST FROG?
BEN: Okay, so immediately off the top of my head, the first frog that comes to mind is like the appropriated Pepe racist meme-y thing. I’m wondering if there’s sort of that involved.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: I don’t have any real conceptual hand or footholds on Protest Frog, so I defer to you, Hedvig.
DANIEL: Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I know that there is a frog related to red pill meme culture, Pepe the Frog, which sadly was created by someone who doesn’t agree with it, by the way. And every now and then, he sues people. But I actually did see something flick by in my feed of people dressed up as frogs that looked different and they were at a, I think, not red pill event in the US, so I think it’s other frogs, actually.
BEN: Can I ask, is this anything to do with the delightful inflatable frog costumes from East Asia that salute and do funny things?
DANIEL: So, the USA is now a country where the agency known as ICE has power to grab people, disappear them. There’re all kinds of civil rights abuses going on. Also, the president of the USA, Donald Trump, is inflaming the situation day by saying, “The big cities of America are ridden with crime. There are continual riots. They are burning, the glass is broken out of windows.” Into this mix comes people who are protesting ICE, people who are making things hard for ICE, following them around, honking, beeping, sometimes rescuing people who are about to be detained out of their clutches. And at these protests, notably the recent No Kings rallies, people are showing up wearing frog suits. The inflatable frog.
HEDVIG: Ah.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Now, I first became aware of Protest Frog because someone was wearing an inflatable frog suit to an ICE protest in, I think it was Chicago, but it could be Portland and some ICE guy, I won’t say officer, because who knows? They’re masked up. They don’t say who they are. This guy directed pepper spray into the ventilation hole in that person’s frog suit.
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: Ooh, that’s rough.
DANIEL: So now, that person was basically encased in a bag full of gas. They later said that they were okay. But at subsequent protests, night after night, the frog costumes kept coming. There were three people inflatable frog suits with a sign that said “Frogs together strong.” In Portland, there’s now… you can see video and we’ll put some up on the show notes, there’s a squirrel, there’s a panda, chicken, peacock, axolotl, shark, Teletubby, T-Rex, giraffe. And this does a wonderful thing, the absurdism of seeing all these inflatable costumes means that you see President Trump saying, “These cities are hellholes.” And then it goes to the actual protest, and it’s just people being silly and absurd and great and having a good time and dancing around. So, it undercuts that narrative. It serves as an important marker of tone for the proceedings to remind everybody this is nonviolent.
And also, it brings in an element of ridicule. Ridicule is amazing stuff. It doesn’t hurt good ideas, but it is lethal to bad ideas. Making somebody look silly, making authority look silly, is incredibly powerful. So, my Halloween costume this year is: I’m Protest Frog. I have ordered the costume. It’s on its way because I think it’s of the moment.
BEN: They seem like a very fun costume to have anyway. They are inherently a silliness-imbibing entity, I think, which is really great. I am a tiny bit worried on your point of not silliness, ridicule. That is true assuming you haven’t yet reached proper authoritarian, fascist regime measures, at which point, ridicule is not powerful. Ridicule is unfortunately a very effective way to become disappeared. That’s the only concern I have. It’s really unclear when exactly America is going to turn into, like, 1970s Chile. And it’s very fun and silly right up until it’s very not fun and not silly. And that’s my only worry.
DANIEL: Are people in frog costumes being disappeared? No, not yet. Is that your concern, that that’s going to happen? Anybody in a suit just gets…?
HEDVIG: He’s saying that satire only gets you so far. If you’re in a harsh enough environment, that’s not really a powerful thing to be doing. That’s just like a fun thing for you to be doing.
BEN: Having said that, Daniel, I fully agree, fully agree with the sentiment, that we should deride and ridicule these unbelievably childish and infantile measures and systems and places. And I agree, the vibe is immaculate. I’m not on the front line. Knowing what I know about how America is right now, I would be potentially quite wary of being on the front line now that people are being disappeared. And so, I feel really uncomfortable being like, “Hey, everyone, it would be great if you do this”, if that thing is not a thing I would be willing to do for safety concerns.
DANIEL: Okay, let me put it this way then. People are going to protest, and I think it is good of them to put themselves on the line.
BEN: Definitely.
DANIEL: How do we do that? We can do that in our human skin suits. And that is a very good thing, to show up. The addition of inflatable animals…
BEN: Is nearly always fantastic. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah, I agree. In principle, I agree.
DANIEL: It’s not saying this is a party. It’s doing a lot to undercut the notion that the cities are hellholes and that everything’s on fire.
BEN: And look, I actually think that there is merit to the idea that a protest should to some degree be a party, right?
DANIEL: It’s a way of showing that this is nonviolent.
BEN: There is something to be said about showing up and delighting in camaraderie with your people, with the citizens, with community. I get all of that. I just… I’m scared, Daniel.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: I am scared for the people.
DANIEL: Definitely.
HEDVIG: Going back to the word and the costume, I can report that this does stem from China in the end. Since like 2022 at least, I looked this up, there’s been people using these frog costumes as protests in China for another purpose which is, seems to me from a couple of pages that I’ve read so far, that it’s more of a protest against a highly competitive consumerist capitalist culture where you feel you’re being left behind and you’re useless and frogs are supposed to be useless and unimportant. It actually is similar to Pepe the Frog but with a slightly different angle.
DANIEL: It’s the anti-Pepe. We’re reclaiming frogs.
BEN: Did they… Also, did the frog costume become…
HEDVIG: In the US, it is very… In China, it seems to be a similar thing to the Pepe in a sense.
DANIEL: I see.
BEN: And do we know if they’ve chosen the frog costume because it was the East’s version of the inflatable T-Rex? It was just a popular costume and people were like, “Aha”?
HEDVIG: So, the website, theworldofchinese.com says that people have used frogs earlier in Chinese internet culture to mock the single status of themselves during Valentine’s Day. So, it seems to be that self-deprecating…
BEN: Oh, okay. Yeah, that is similar to Pepe.
HEDVIG: That is a little bit like Pepe. Yeah, exactly. I don’t think it’s fully as like red pilled as like there’s an evil cabal, deep state blah blah. [BEN LAUGHS] But more of the, “I don’t have any opportunities. I am trying very hard, and nothing is happening in my life. And I’m going to check out of society,” which is, what do we call that? There’s a word in Japanese society for this.
BEN: Oh, I do. Yes.
HEDVIG: When you just live in your apartment.
BEN: Yeah, I’ve forgotten though. I do know what you mean.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I mean it could be incel, but it doesn’t have to be… I think it doesn’t have to be necessarily as misogynist. I don’t know. We’ll have to have someone because I’ve seen… there’s been the last like 10, 15 years whenever we’ve had new words from China or Japan, a lot of them have actually been focused on like left-behind women, useless men, people living in their apartments, people checking out of their work culture, which is quite interesting actually. We should get someone who actually understands more about those cultures to explain it to us.
BEN: That was a long one for Protest Frog. I’m impressed. We managed to strip every shred of meat off the bone there.
DANIEL: Well, let’s go on to the next one: KAVANAUGH STOP. Another American one.
BEN: Remind me who Brett Kavanaugh is again.
DANIEL: He is a Supreme Court justice appointed by Trump. So, in September 2025, the six Trump justices made a ruling that racial profiling was okay. There had been a lower court ruling that said that ICE couldn’t arrest anyone for things like their skin colour or for speaking Spanish or for being in a certain place looking like they’re looking for work for that day. And the Supreme Court said… they blocked that lower court ruling. And so now, it’s legal to detain or arrest someone because of those things.
Brett Kavanaugh, for his part, wrote a 10-page concurrence making the case for summary detention, in which he said, get this, this is the quote that interested me. And I’m not a lawyer. I’m just trying my best to understand. He said, “The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country, in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning, is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest.” Yeah, they just don’t want to get captured because they’re just trying to break the law.
BEN: But hang on, that’s also not what… I imagine that is not the core of the argument against racial profiling from a legal standpoint. I would imagine the core of the argument is by racial profiling, you are going to get a fuckton of false positives and so huge numbers of American citizens… Now, we all know on this podcast that I believe that people who are in America illegally deserve every ounce of the same rights and freedoms as everything else, as anyone else.
DANIEL: Yes, thank you.
BEN: But I would have imagined the legal argument is that you are going to harm lots and lots of legal American citizens by racially profiling.
DANIEL: Yeah. And that’s just not how you do it. It is cruel and unjust and capricious and just lends itself to all kinds of abuses.
BEN: So, his argument of like, “Well, I don’t really care about the interests of illegal immigrants,” I’m like, “Well, fucking great for you, mate, but that’s not the…”
DANIEL: You’re scooping up a lot of people. “Hey, we’re looking for bank robbers. And if you don’t want to be stopped, questioned, detained and chucked into a van and flown into a different country and disappeared, then you ultimately have an interest in evading the law.”
BEN: Yeah, the argument there would be like, “Well, I don’t really care about the people who want to rob banks. So therefore, it’s okay for you to arrest anyone who just is in a bank.”
DANIEL: Because that’s how it works, right? You’ll have terrible precision, but you’ll have great recall, right? So, that’s a Kavanaugh stop.
HEDVIG: Can I try and understand… Can I understand something? There are lots of people in America or there are people in America who aren’t there with the correct visas and residency permits, who are working for people who have a company.
DANIEL: They might be undocumented. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Who are working probably more unskilled labour than skilled labour, broadly.
DANIEL: It skews that way.
HEDVIG: These companies, isn’t it in this interest… say I’m a tomato farmer and I need people to pick my tomatoes. How is it not in my interest as tomato farmer to try and either hire people who have all of their legalities perfectly lined up or if I hire someone who don’t try and help them to?
BEN: Money, I would imagine, is the really boring and simple answer.
HEDVIG: So, isn’t that the problem then? Because if you want to remove all these people who you believe are there illegally, then you have a lot fewer tomato pickers. So then, you either need to convince American teenagers to pick tomatoes, which they don’t.
BEN: Or you need to set up a visa program to bring all of the people who were…
HEDVIG: Or you need to set up a visa program to bring in people like Australia, New Zealanders with Pacific Islanders, for example.
BEN: Yes, I was about to say exactly the same thing. So, for those outside [LAUGHS] who are not aware of the economics of vegetable production in Australia, which is understandable, Australia has specific visas for cheap labourers to come from Pacific Island nations like Nauru and Tonga and Samoa and that sort of thing, and come seasonally to pick vegetables in Australia, therefore earning much more money than they would be able to earn back home but comparatively earn much less money than an Australian or a backpacker or whatever would be paid here in Australia.
HEDVIG: Right.
BEN: I think the answer to your question is, Hedvig, there is no world that I can see where that argument carries any fucking water with Americans at the voting level. If you come forward and say, “Hey, everyone, this whole situation with illegal immigrants is super fucked up. I want to create a series of visas that would just standardise and normalise this process,” you wouldn’t even get to the second syllable of “standardise” before a overwhelming pack of insane people would be like, “He wants to fucking open our borders and swim our people in a brown wave of Mexicans,” and all that kind of shit. You cannot have a reasonable…
HEDVIG: That’s so strange.
BEN: …effective discussion. But this can’t be news to you, surely. This can’t be surprising.
HEDVIG: Because it’s like they set up this own little roleplay of bankers… What’s it called? Robbers and thieves.
BEN: Bank robbers. Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Bank robbers where you have this system where undocumented people, people who are illegally working but who are good people who probably want to do right for themselves, can’t easily do it. So, they have to be in this gray category. And then, you have people defending that. But if you’re in a legal system, shouldn’t [LAUGHS] it’s… why…?
DANIEL: These are people who don’t want to solve the problem. They want to enact cruelty.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: That’s what they want.
HEDVIG: But then they’re forcing…
DANIEL: Because the idea behind white supremacy and other kinds of supremacy is, “We matter, they don’t. We should get to do whatever we want to them.” That is what they believe. At base, that is the core of it.
BEN: So, your flummoxedness, Hedvig, is basically a very understandable one, is that there is actually a very clear and simple solution to this problem that would work for all of the stakeholders, including the conservative people who are like, “We want less people here illegally.” That is 100% true, but…
HEDVIG: Also, for the progressives, why…? You don’t want to be forced into a situation where you’re saying unfortunately… I’m trying to figure out a phrase this, like, you don’t want to be forced in a situation where you’re like, “I feel like I have to help people who are in a gray legal status continue to be in a gray legal status.” That seems like something you don’t want to be doing.
BEN: Sure.
HEDVIG: Right?
BEN: You, I believe, maybe just can’t, maybe, I guess, wrap your head around the idea that for some of these people, like Daniel said, fixing the problem is not the goal. But more than that is that you’re presuming that fixing the problem is relatively independent from moralising and soapboxing and that sort of stuff.
For a lot of the people who are working against helping, fixing, streamlining, whatever you want to say, what the reality is for unskilled work in America, they see it… I hate to say this, but I think it’s true, they see it as like a holy mandate. They see it as a thing that exists beyond simply the idea of, like, what works and what doesn’t. But as, like, a… Like, Fucking Jesus says no or whatever, right? Like, insert whatever insane fucking deific thing you want there. It’s not a maths problem to them. It’s not an economics problem. It is a moral…
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: Crusade.
BEN: Crusade, yeah, thank you. It is a crusade that you will… Like, they will die on the hill. It is the same as Israeli settlers, if that helps you.
HEDVIG: This is so strange as well because… and forgive me again, I’m trying to phrase myself as delicately as I can, but a lot of unskilled labour from the south of the border of the US are probably more religious than the average American, which means that if you were a conservative person [BEN LAUGHS] and you wanted to get some more voters, you could probably get an in there. Like, you could probably appeal to some core religious and family values with that population.
BEN: But they’re brown.
DANIEL: Yeah, unfortunately, racism comes higher on the hierarchy than religion.
BEN: But they’re brown, Hedvig. They’re the wrong kind of… they love the wrong Jesus.
DANIEL: They’re the wrong kind of Catholic. Yeah.
BEN: I’ve seen their churches. They have a brown Jesus, Hedvig, how could you possibly?
HEDVIG: They do?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: [SOTTO VOCE] Googles Mexican Catholic churches.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at like African churches and stuff, they often have like black Jesuses and stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but I thought… Anyway, all right, we’re getting derailed.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It’s very hard for me to understand because like I, as a person who care about these people, I also don’t want to be forced into a position to say people should do something that is not entirely legal in the system. That also seems bad.
BEN: Yeah. Like the status quo is fucked. Let’s not keep the status quo being the way it is.
HEDVIG: And then, just hide people in cellars.
BEN: But then someone comes along and is like, “But what if we disappeared people?” And you’re like, “Oh, fuck. Okay, the status quo then.”
DANIEL: But into this problem comes somebody with the moral mind of a three-year-old who listens to Heinz’s Dilemma and says, “Oh, well, Heinz shouldn’t steal that medicine because stealing is wrong.” It’s simple for me to say. And bring some cruelty to that and some vengeance, and boy, you’ve got a really heady brew.
BEN: Narcissism. Always good.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to… We’re going to do one more slightly… We’re going to live in this right wing for a little longer and then we’re going to climb out, okay?
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: RETVRN, but the U is changed to a V. So, I guess it looks like retvrn, but it’s RETURN with a V instead of a U.
BEN: So, my first question is this harking to…
HEDVIG: Roman Empire.
BEN: I was about to say European buildings.
DANIEL: Roman Empire. [BEN LAUGHS] Yes, indeed. It is. Well, sort of, yes. Okay.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: Because they didn’t used to have a U-V distinction. So, everything that was sort of… Yeah, there wasn’t a U, basically.
DANIEL: Okay, but “retvrn” to what?
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Oh, okay. This could be one of two things. Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: 1950s suburban American usually, right?
BEN: Yeah, yeah. So, it could be that.
HEDVIG: Okay. If it’s not that, it could be like their made-up version of like cavemen, Paleolithic, I eat liver all the time.
BEN: Yeah. So, I was going to say it’s either a return to like the nuclear blah, blah. The thing that never actually existed in America ever.
DANIEL: Yes, yes.
BEN: Or it could actually be a much more targeted, policy-esque thing of like, “We want to return all of the non-white Anglo people back to their origin point.” Now, us three understand it’s like, “Wait, a huge proportion of those brown people were born in America and America is made up almost entirely of immigrants other than the Native Americans,” but I’m guessing it might be that. Like, it’s the Great Return or something like that. Like, the Final Solution in the Nazi sort of lexicon or something like that.
HEDVIG: Or alternatively, Ben, it’s return all the Anglos to England. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: We’ve had enough!
HEDVIG: They have lots of space, I’ve heard!
DANIEL: But I was born here.
BEN: We want warm lager again.
DANIEL: Well, this is a word that right wing authoritarians use to imagine a past, maybe the Roman Empire.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: But a special version of the Roman Empire where they’re not the ones being enslaved? somehow? Okay. I don’t think there’s any idea that’s caused more intellectual mischief than the idea that the answers lie in how we did things in the past and we’ve gotten away from the true path and we need to go back.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: What’s really happening is that we’re trying to gain… many of us are trying to gain a sense of collective empathy and recognise that other people have rights, which is of course the opposite of supremacy. But it’s being spelled with a V rather than a U because as Hedvig mentions, the U and the V used to be sort of like different forms of the same letter because U came to the alphabet kind of late. So, if it came at the front of the word, like the word UPON, it was a V, and if it came in the middle of the word, like HEAVEN or DIVINE, it got a U. You can find lots of cases of HEAVEN or DIVINE or other words being spelled with a U in the middle. Those two letters, U and V, wouldn’t really sort themselves out until the 1600s or the 1700s. So, the use of the letter V in the word RETVRN is — like everything else in this movement — ahistoric.
BEN: Ugh. Apocryphal.
DANIEL: Something to watch out for. Okay, let’s move on. Let’s get out of here. THAT’S AI. This is a fun one, actually.
HEDVIG: It is.
DANIEL: Oh, do you want to take it?
HEDVIG: Is it just like a clickbait, rage bait…? Bait, that’s AI?
BEN: No, I’m wondering if this is a version of like, “That’s cap,” right? Or whatever. It’s a little rejoinder when someone says something like, flagrantly untrue, like, “Oh, on the weekend, like, I got like totally smashed and scored with some chick.” And someone just fires off, “That’s AI.”
DANIEL: Got totally pajama’d. That’s it. This is a BlueSky post from William Gibson. Here it is. ‘A friend writes, “I saw someone’s post somewhere that talked about how their nine-year-old and all his friends have started using, ‘That’s AI’ instead of ‘I don’t believe you.’ Mom says, “We’re having dinosaur meat for dinner tonight.” Kid – “That’s AI.”‘ [LAUGHS]
BEN: Awesome. I dig it. I’m glad I guessed it.
DANIEL: You did. And you can see how this gets that way. For example, “Hey, Ben, I’ve got video of you snorting popcorn salt up your nose.” And you could say, “That’s AI.” Meaning: If you did see that video, it was an AI version of it. That didn’t happen. It’s not real.
BEN: Daniel, this isn’t for the podcast, but you promised me that video was actually just between us. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Sorry about that. I don’t know why I blabbed that. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.
HEDVIG: But similarly, with the once in a lifetime, I would argue that’s AI… that’s just like what those words mean. [LAUGHTHER]
DANIEL: AI is fake, right?
HEDVIG: This is like a new… Or it’s just a description of something.
BEN: I like it. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] I would love for this to be… like, if we can displace 6-7 with THAT’S AI… Or actually, do you know what? One of the things that I saw for many years and still rears its head from time to time, and I try and quash it where I can, is a flippant use of “That’s racist.” [DANIEL LAUGHS] I see that a lot in high school. Like, someone will come in and be like, “Oh, you haven’t done your homework,” or whatever, “Pshh, that’s racist.” And obviously, that’s actually quite damaging and concerning because it takes a not trivial thing and makes it very trivial. But I would love for THAT’S AI to take the place of THAT’S CAP or like CAP. That could be really fun. Just anything to critique AI is A-okay by me.
HEDVIG: Hey, speaking of, have we done 6-7 as a Word of the Week yet?
DANIEL: Caitlin told us about it a few times ago, so we’re good there.
HEDVIG: Okay, yes. Never mind.
DANIEL: Last one suggested by James, FORCING PARTY. What’s a forcing party?
BEN: Doesn’t sound good. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Forcing party. No.
DANIEL: Or maybe really good.
BEN: Okay. Forcing.
HEDVIG: Like, you force food down someone’s throat. You force… Like forcing is bad.
BEN: Yeah, forcing, it does not have a positive vibe at all.
DANIEL: Okay, well…
BEN: Forcing party.
HEDVIG: Forcing party.
BEN: What do you force, someone to get clean? Like, an intervention?
DANIEL: I’ll tell you what it is. A good long time ago, we had a chat with Grant Barrett. It was just me and him for this episode, and we talked about the ERRAND HANG. The sweetness of the errand hang, where you’re hanging out with a friend, but you’re using the time hanging together to do something you got to do. A FORCING PARTY is a bit like this. And this is an article by…
BEN: Oh, like a demolition party or something.
DANIEL: Demolition party?
BEN: Like, if you’ve got to knock down a house, you have a big demolition party.
DANIEL: Oh, right. So, this is a gathering where you get together with friends and force each other to do tasks that you’ve been blocking on.
HEDVIG: Yes, I’ve done this. We’ve called it, like, “Let’s do life admin together.”
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Like, an accountability party, perhaps?
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, I like that. Accountability party.
DANIEL: If we were having a forcing party, the three of us, what would I be forcing you to do?
BEN: Oh, Jesus. It’s always marking. It’s just always marking.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yes, it is. It’s always marking.
BEN: It’s always some marking that needs to be done that could be done sooner than it’s being done.
DANIEL: And it is the worst. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I am really… This happened last night. I don’t know why, I think booking travel, flights, trains, buses, hotels, gives me a lot of anxiety, actually.
BEN: Really?
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Because I’m like…
DANIEL: It doesn’t have to make sense.
HEDVIG: But what if it’d be better for Ste, I left at 2 instead of 3? What if my mom needs to do this thing? And then, I try and I spell out all the possible parameters, and then none of the solutions fit all of those perfectly, right? [BEN LAUGHS] And then, I get very, very anxious. It’s all that and then I kind of freeze up and I’m like, “But I could book a flexi option to account for some of this stuff. Oh, but it’s €200 more expensive.”
BEN: So, we would have to force you to do your travel arrangements.
HEDVIG: I did this a bit last night and yeah, it’s not funny. I’m bad at it.
DANIEL: You would be forcing me to complete the course outline for this unit that I’m supposed to be doing next year.
BEN: Ugh, materials creation sucks.
DANIEL: Argh. Actually, I quite enjoy it. I create a lot of materials. But I am seriously blocking on this one. And don’t tell my supervisor. Celeste, don’t listen. All right, so…
BEN: FORCING PARTY. Okay, I think we need a better name because forcing party just has a bad vibe. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I don’t know if I want to participate in a forcing party, but can I watch?
HEDVIG: Can we use… We had the word COMRADE earlier.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Which was about being in the same room.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: See my train here?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: So, let’s do something like COMRADE CHORE PARTY.
BEN: Ooh, I like that.
HEDVIG: Something along those lines.
DANIEL: Comrade chore party.
HEDVIG: I’m bad at affricates in English. I’m not… And when they come after each other, they’re similar and very bad. Comrade chore, well, let’s not pick CHORE then, because I can’t say it. COMRADE ERRAND PARTY.
BEN: I like that.
DANIEL: I think we’re back to ERRAND HANG. I feel like we’re back there.
BEN: Yeah, maybe. Maybe we’re just doing an errand hang, really.
HEDVIG: ERRAND HANG is pretty good.
DANIEL: Okay, well, here we go. We’ve got PROTEST FROG, KAVANAUGH STOP, RETVRN with a V, THAT’S AI. And we still don’t know, at this point, it’s a FORCING PARTY, but it could be an ACCOUNTABILITY PARTY, a COMRADE CHORE PARTY, or even an ERRAND HANG. They’re our Words of the Week.
Let’s get to this comment from Dax of SpeechDocs. Hey, Dax. You might remember that we had the etymology of BANDICOOT, which turned out to be a word from Telugu. Dax says, “When Telugu popped up in the chat, I was stunned. Never thought I’d hear my mother tongue get a shoutout.” There’s like 80 million people that speak that language, Dax, of course…
HEDVIG: It’s a big language.
DANIEL: …it’s a big language.
DANIEL: “And since you’ve talked about it, the word BANDICOOT actually comes from the Telugu word, pandikoku, which literally means pig rat. But in everyday Telugu homes, elders also use pandikoku in a totally different way. Teasing kids who eat too much, especially junk food.” [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, don’t tease people about eating. That can be really bad.
BEN: Yes, it can. But at the same time, there is something really fun and cute about like a kid that you discover like head first in a bag of chips or whatever and being like, “You little pig rat. What are you doing?”
DANIEL: “It’s a playful cultural idiom I grew up hearing.” Dax continues, “While we’re on the Telugu train, I can’t resist recommending you three to watch this Telugu movie, RRR.” I’m sure Ben, you’re on this.
BEN: Yes. Oh, yes.
DANIEL: “It’s the Oscar-winning blockbuster. Just make sure to watch it in Telugu, not the Hindi dub for the real experience. Anything else is like feta without the crumble.” Thanks, Dax. And thanks for transcribing all our words.
BEN: I had no idea that RRR was… mother language was Telugu. That’s really interesting.
DANIEL: Yep, sure is. Thanks to our guest, Natan Last. Thanks to everybody who gave stories, words and comments. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. And thanks to you great patrons. We heart you with both of our heart hands. All three, we got six hands here. [PAUSE] Do a heart hands, Ben.
BEN: Oh, sorry, sorry. I was, I was reading the…
DANIEL: Yeah, I do it the old way again.
HEDVIG: If you like our show or if you hate our show, if you feel strongly about our show and you want to have more to love or to hate, there’s a couple of things you can do. You can follow us in all the places. We are @becauselangpod in most places and we are becauselanguage.com on BlueSky specifically, which I’m getting into using again, actually.
DANIEL: Oh, me too.
HEDVIG: I’m not still using it as much as I used Twitter at the peak of Twitter, but I kind of do like it. It’s a cute place to share things. We are also on TikTok where, Ben, I don’t know if you noticed, but Daniel actually uses the videos and then clips us. And in one recent video, it’s a very unflattering video of me, but I’m okay with that because my job is not to be a supermodel. My job is to be relatively smart.
DANIEL: I thought you looked great. You did a shoulder shimmy that I thought was really cute.
HEDVIG: There’s a bunch of me trying to look at my other screen and looking down and then you can see how truly thick my glasses are, [BEN LAUGHS] which is very, very thick.
BEN: Coke bottle!
HEDVIG: Anyway, anyway, we are on TikTok as well, where Daniel puts up little clips of us. And you can also support us… If you’re not a patron and on our Discord, you can also send us ideas in other ways. We have a regular old email which works perfectly fine, hello@becauselanguage.com. If you have a fun idea for Related or Not or Word of the Week or something like that, or a jingle, we want new Related or Not jingles in jungle, which is a British electronic dance music genre is what I’m going to describe it as for now.
DANIEL: We’ll play anything.
HEDVIG: I know it’s not… [LAUGHS] We’ll play anything.
BEN: Facts. That’s the… He’s just spitting facts.
HEDVIG: I’m a big fan of bossa nova. I like bossa nova. You can also share your lovely voice with us if you want. If you want us to play you on the episode, you can go to our website, becauselanguage.com and on the right side, I believe the menu is, there’s a SpeakPipe thing where you can click. You can also just record a thing if you want, send us an email. Another great way to support the show is to tell a friend about us. That is after all how most of us, I think, get the kinds of content we have in our feeds.
You can also write a review at… I think my favourite place is podchaser.com but also iTunes has a very popular place to review things. Reviews actually do help podcasts, so whatever podcast you like, consider reviewing them, giving them… Anything above three stars, I think is nice. If you want to give us a one for shits and giggles, if you’re one of Ben’s students, then please just like write a rude review and give us a five because computer doesn’t know satire. [LAUGHTER] Computer only knows ones and fives. And yeah, that’d be great.
DANIEL: Great. That would be great. And you know what else would be great? Becoming a patron will do things for you. You get stuff depending on your level. We do live shows, bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts. You get to hang with the cool people on Discord, and we get your support that does a number of things for us. It helps us to pay the bills, helps us to make the show good, helps us to make sure that the mailout happens, which is something I’m working on now, so that’s fun. Hey, we’d like to give a shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. And I thought of a way to order the names that involves crosswords.
BEN: Whoo. Good.
HEDVIG: In honour of Natan.
DANIEL: Yes. Because this episode was our crossword episode with Natan Last, I thought this would be a fun way to do it. I wanted to know how crosswordy is your name.
HEDVIG and BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: The way I decided to calculate that is by letter because some letters are overrepresented in crossword puzzles compared to normal text and some of them are underrepresented.
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, I’m looking at an article in…
HEDVIG: Interesting.
DANIEL …Medium by writer Maya. Link in the show notes for this episode. Turns out the letter A appears 3.8% more in crosswords than in regular words. So, if your name has an A in it, you get 3.8 points.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: Oh, but the letter H appears 3.9% less in crosswords than we would expect looking at regular text. So, if you have an H, you’re not very crosswordy, so your name goes down by 3.9 points.
HEDVIG: These are very interesting facts to know. [BEN LAUGHS] I’m going to tell my husband who likes to do crosswords.
DANIEL: Okay, well, we’ll have the details on the show notes, but I’ll just tell you that letters that appear a lot in crosswords, S is heavily represented because of plurals. Also, P, L and R. But T, W and F not so much. So, some letters boost your score, some letters ding your score. Here are the winners. Ariaflame at 13.3 points. It’s all those A’s. gramaryen, Lyssa at 10 points, had all those S’s. Laura, James, Elías, Ayesha, sæ̃m, Larry, we’re going down the scale, Joanna, Steele, Nasrin, Margareth, and Canny Archer at 5.4.
Now, here are some names that are slightly more crosswordy than average. Natan is here, 4.5. Amir, Colleen, Aldo, I’m right here at 4.2. Molly Dee, Stan, Amy, Rachel, Martha…
BEN and DANIEL: LordMortis.
DANIEL: Rene, Manú at 3. Luis and Rodger both at 2.6. We’ve got Kristofer, Andy B, Andy from Logophilius at 1.9. See, this is why I love this is because a long name doesn’t mean you automatically win. There’s more chances to go up or go down. PharaohKatt, Sydney at 1.6, ignacio, Fiona. Now we’re in the ones. Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ is at 1. Rach. Ben, you are here at 1 point.
BEN: Whoo.
DANIEL: Nigel, Sonic Snejhog, Chris L, and Termy at 0.03. Now, we’re in the negatives. These are names that are not very crosswordy.
HEDVIG: My name has not turned up yet. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Keep waiting, Hedvig. Keep waiting.
DANIEL: Kevin, Diego, Helen, Faux Frenchie, and Nikoli at 0.9. Now, here’s the less than 1, Mignon…
IN UNISON: O Tim.
DANIEL: Wolfdog, Kathy, Tadhg, and Felicity. Now, here are the names that are not crosswordy at all. Tony, Meredith, Iztin, John K. Hedvig, you’re on negative 4.5 points.
BEN: Woof. Woof.
DANIEL: Well, it’s the H. The H really knocked you down. Keith at negative 5.2 and J0HNTR0Y at negative 5.9 with the least crosswordy name.
BEN: You got the bronze, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly. There are two people below me. [LAUGHTER] I’m not the worst.
DANIEL: But remember, getting a low score somewhere is getting a high score somewhere else. Thanks to our latest patrons at the Listener level, Ben H. And hello to our newest free patrons, Fiona M, Mairy, Kommyl-fô, and Nicole. Thanks to all our patrons.
BEN: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Thank you both.
[BOOP]
BEN: Okay, so basically… and I’ll do this as quickly as I can so I don’t piss off Daniel too much…
DANIEL: No, you won’t.
BEN: Within… [LAUGHS]
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I’m back on the eating… Like not eating until 11am and then stopping after dinner. Just hit the brakes on the cereal after dinner or the yogurt after dinner, cereal after dinner.
HEDVIG: Cereal after dinner? This is an American thing?
BEN: Cereal after dinner? Such a fascinatingly… Yeah, very American thing.
DANIEL: Okay, I’m kind of revealing my inner weakness because this is something bad that I try not to feel bad about, but I just don’t do it.
BEN: Also, when we say cereal, let’s create the spectrum with like a single Weetbik unadorned at one end and Lucky Charms at the other. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, guess which end I hew towards? The dessert cereals.
BEN: Yeah. If we’re talking shamenoms, it’s got to be like your… What was my favourite one? Cinnamon Toast Crunch or something.
HEDVIG: I was just going to say Cinnamon Toast Crunch is the best. Except that in Germany, Aldi sells, like a knockoff version that I actually like better.
BEN: Oh, that’s rough. So good, it’s so goodly bad.
HEDVIG: Like Cinnamon Crunch or something. I like it.
[BOOP]
BEN: If you guys have… Hedvig, I’m surprised. Have you not heard of this?
DANIEL: I did start watching RRR. I haven’t finished it yet.
BEN: Okay, Hedvig, the reason why I say I’m surprised at this because this is exactly the kind of ri-di-culous, over-the-top bullshit nonsense that Eurovision works for you. Like, this is…
HEDVIG: Oh, I see.
BEN: This is just take everything you know about Bollywood and dial it up to 11. But, and this is really crucial because I actually really struggle with a lot of Bollywood for the same reason that I struggle with a lot of anime, there’s like some really not great gender stuff that often goes on and all that kind of stuff. But with this particular one, there is just… They captured lightning in a bottle. And there is some sort of kind of universal appeal to this that seems to cut through every possible cultural barrier that exists. It’s heaps of fun. And it’s essentially like a buddy comedy about two bro dudes who are like… it’s a very Stepbrothers thing of, like, “Did we just become best friends?” but with like singing and dancing.
HEDVIG: Singing and dancing. I did scroll through the plot here, and I see the words, British Raj and Colonial Police, and trying to avoid them somehow.
BEN: It’s great. It’s a really good time.
HEDVIG: Okay, cool.
BEN: Put it on the list. For sure, put it on the list.
HEDVIG: Oh, Ste… Yeah. Our list is getting really long. We’ve made a spreadsheet. [BEN LAUGHS]
BEN: You’ve made a spreadsheet.
HEDVIG: Of course we did. Of course we did. What are you talking about?
BEN: You fucking nerds.
HEDVIG: Do you know how many spreadsheets we had for our wedding? Of course we did. Ste yesterday actually found a way of… Because we have a list on, like, Netflix, Disney and Criterion.
BEN: Sure.
HEDVIG: And then we have the Keep list and the downloaded things, and yesterday he put them all into one spreadsheet, and it has a lot of rows.
BEN: Good for him.
DANIEL: If I could ever watch anything because I have children, I would do it. But here’s what happens to me, I put the kids to bed at 8:00, and I lie down next to one of the children. At 09:30, I wake up.
BEN: Oh, wow.
DANIEL: And then, it’s time to go to bed for real. So, there’s not a lot of Severance. There’s not a lot of RRR going on at my place.
BEN: That’s tough. Yeah, no…
HEDVIG: Daniel, I have no children and no significant dependents in anyway. And I’ll tell you for free that I am rereading The Steerswoman for the fourth time and I’m watching Star Trek again, so…
BEN: I don’t think I’ve thanked you enough for putting me onto that series, Hedvig, because it fucking slaps. And it is so… You know how on TikTok… and I know we need to finish, so I’m really sorry. You know how on TikTok you get those really fucking cheesy “Five underground books that you’ve never heard of in the fantasy genre” or whatever. And it’s always just some basic-bitch shit that every man and his dog has heard of. The Steerswoman is genuinely one of those things that a person will never, ever fucking stumble across, ever. And it is so good. It is a genuine underground sleeper hit. It’s fucking great. So, anyone who’s listening to this… Daniel, you leave this shit in, I swear to god, anyone who’s listening to this, if you like genre fiction, if you like fantasy, if you like sci-fi, fucking…
HEDVIG: Like the scientific methods.
BEN: …get on The Steerswomen. It is so good. It is so good.
DANIEL: It is on my list. It really, really is.
BEN: I love it.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]