ACROSTIC — Today’s passage sounds so modern to me that I was surprised to learn that its source dates all the way back to 2005, which is almost before Amazon Prime existed — if you were just about to say, “Hey, Caitlin, 2005 wasn’t really so long ago.” The constructors David Balton and Jane Stewart drew from “Talk to the Hand,” a book by Lynne Truss, a prodigious writer, journalist and noted stickler of language. (You may remember her earlier book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” which was a major best seller that I really enjoyed, not that I remember exactly where to put my commas, all the time, sadly.)
“Talk to the Hand” seems a bit like “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” except that the author takes issue with actual people, rather than just words and punctuation, and Truss — whose subtitle for “Talk to the Hand” is “The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door) — has about had it with the lot of us. In particular, the excerpt laments our digital lives, as we bury our faces in screens to interact with one another, losing real-life social skills.
The puzzle’s clue set is stuffed with cleverly presented terms relating to that electronic universe. “Item not free of charge, ideally,” sounded like an atomic reference to me — an electron or some such — but it’s a LAPTOP. (What’s more frustrating than a dead laptop, and nowhere to plug it in?) An “Identifier more often typed than uttered” is a USERNAME; “Genetically predisposed” is HARD-WIRED. I struggled slightly with both of these clues, but was amused by their answers. A “Modern subject of parental limit on kids” is more specific, but also fun: It’s SCREENTIME, which made me think of my own predigital childhood when I was allowed to watch one half-hour program on a blocky tube television after school, or two, if one was “educational.” A “Creative use of punctuation?” is an EMOTICON, and a “Horizontal menu” is a TOOLBAR.
There are still more examples, most of them straightforwardly clued. I noted one trivia question that goes back to the old days before flat screen TVs and that solves to a double meaning. The “1976 movie with the line ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’” solves to NETWORK, something that serves to connect us — except that nowadays, we’re more likely to actually interact in person when our NETWORK is down (or, as another clue says: “Out of operation for now,” or OFFLINE).
ACROSTIC — Today’s passage sounds so modern to me that I was surprised to learn that its source dates all the way back to 2005, which is almost before Amazon Prime existed — if you were just about to say, “Hey, Caitlin, 2005 wasn’t really so long ago.” The constructors David Balton and Jane Stewart drew from “Talk to the Hand,” a book by Lynne Truss, a prodigious writer, journalist and noted stickler of language. (You may remember her earlier book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” which was a major best seller that I really enjoyed, not that I remember exactly where to put my commas, all the time, sadly.)
“Talk to the Hand” seems a bit like “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” except that the author takes issue with actual people, rather than just words and punctuation, and Truss — whose subtitle for “Talk to the Hand” is “The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door) — has about had it with the lot of us. In particular, the excerpt laments our digital lives, as we bury our faces in screens to interact with one another, losing real-life social skills.
The puzzle’s clue set is stuffed with cleverly presented terms relating to that electronic universe. “Item not free of charge, ideally,” sounded like an atomic reference to me — an electron or some such — but it’s a LAPTOP. (What’s more frustrating than a dead laptop, and nowhere to plug it in?) An “Identifier more often typed than uttered” is a USERNAME; “Genetically predisposed” is HARD-WIRED. I struggled slightly with both of these clues, but was amused by their answers. A “Modern subject of parental limit on kids” is more specific, but also fun: It’s SCREENTIME, which made me think of my own predigital childhood when I was allowed to watch one half-hour program on a blocky tube television after school, or two, if one was “educational.” A “Creative use of punctuation?” is an EMOTICON, and a “Horizontal menu” is a TOOLBAR.
There are still more examples, most of them straightforwardly clued. I noted one trivia question that goes back to the old days before flat screen TVs and that solves to a double meaning. The “1976 movie with the line ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’” solves to NETWORK, something that serves to connect us — except that nowadays, we’re more likely to actually interact in person when our NETWORK is down (or, as another clue says: “Out of operation for now,” or OFFLINE).