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Anticonsumerists aiming to help the environment / SAT 2-20-21 / Humorist Leo who wrote Joys of Yiddish / Singer whose name becomes a city if you add an R in the middle / Cold War missile type / Word derived from Greek for age
Saturday, February 20, 2021
Constructor: Ali Gascoigne
Relative difficulty: Medium (again, as with yesterday, the preponderance of proper nouns might make it much tougher)
Word of the Day: Leo ROSTEN (26D: Humorist Leo who wrote "The Joys of Yiddish," 1968) —
Leo Calvin Rosten (April 11, 1908 – February 19, 1997) was an American humorist in the fields of scriptwriting, storywriting, journalism, and Yiddish lexicography. He was also a political scientist interested especially in the relationship of politics and the media. [...] Rosten is best remembered for his stories about the night-school "prodigy" Hyman Kaplan, written under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross. They were published in The New Yorker from 1935[1] and collected in two volumes published in 1937 and 1959, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N and The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. The Education was a "close second" for one U.S. National Book Award in 1938. The second collection was one of eighteen National Book Award for Fiction finalists in 1960. // He is also well known for his encyclopedic The Joys of Yiddish (1968), a guide to Yiddish and to Jewish culture including anecdotes and Jewish humor. It was followed by O K*A*P*L*A*N! My K*A*P*L*A*N! (1976), a reworking of the two 1930s collections, and Hooray for Yiddish! (1982), a humorous lexicon of the American language as influenced by Jewish culture. Another Rosten work is Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations.
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I don't watch "Queen's Gambit" and don't plan to, but I did see last year's "Emma," and ANYA Taylor-Joy was great in that. Still, I remembered her as an ANNA. Alas. Turns out that "Y" is a *crucial* letter in parsing the central Across, "IT'S A YES FROM ME" (32A: "You have my vote!"). I had "IT'S AN ..." and wanted something like "IT'S AN EASY YES," but that didn't fit. How I remembered Leo ROSTEN, I have no idea. I looked at the clue, thought "How am I supposed to remember that?," and then found my fingers typing R-O-S-T-E-N almost independently of me. Weird how you can not know something and know it simultaneously. I am certain that "The Joys of Yiddish" was on my mom's bookshelves in my childhood, along with, I don't know, that blue Zelda Fitzgerald biography, maybe? I didn't read anything on those bookshelves, but they left a strong memory imprint. Still, I did not know that I knew who wrote "Joys of Yiddish" ... until I did. So, trouble with ANYA offset by the unexpected lack of trouble with ROSTEN, which meant what could've been a very hard section created only a minor hold-up. Another hold-up: ELLA before ETTA (47D: "___ Is Betta Than Evvah!" (1976 album)) (I see that you're trying to give me ETTA by including the rhyming 'word' 'Betta' but the double-v in 'Evvah' made me think double-letters, not rhymes, were the deal, so ... ELLA). I have maybe heard of ALICANTE, but certainly don't "know" it, so that answer needed almost every cross. Otherwise I didn't really struggle much. Parsing the longest answers (including SECRET SERVICE) provided most of today's difficulty. The puzzle was very much on my cultural wavelength.
Some more things:
- 1A: Requirement (MUST-DO) — yeesh, that was tough. And slightly awkward. MUST-SEE feels natural (possibly from NBC's '90s TV slogan, "Must-See TV"), whereas MUST-DO feels clunky. "Have you been to the Louvre? Oh, it's a MUST-DO" ... :( ... not saying it's not a thing, but saying it clanks.
- 39D: One doing some stitching (SEAMER) — really? Kinda weak. I'd've gone with [Four-___ (fastball type)], but also I'd've gone with something other than SEAMER.
- 41D: Kind of state (NANNY) — this is right-wing propaganda. Total garbage. There is no such state. NANNY state is what so-called "conservatives" call a functioning government. One with taxes and regulation. And heat and electricity and clean drinking water. You can't include NANNY state in your puzzle like it's an actual, real thing. It bespeaks a fraudulent world view, or at least an extremely politically tendentious world view, and should be clued as such. I mean ... "The term was popularised by the British and American tobacco industry." This clue is cordially invited to *&$% off.
- 43D: Buddy of "Barnaby Jones" (EBSEN) — there will never be a day when I don't hesitate when spelling EBSEN (or EPSOM, or EPSON). You'd think I could get a mnemonic going like "Buddy has a 'B' ... and the 'E' at the front has a 'buddy' toward the back." Solves the "B" and the "E" dilemma. But I guarantee I won't even remember writing this the next time EBSEN's in the grid.
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