After a year of doing New York Times crossword puzzles on my phone every day during subway rides, I’ve noticed certain patterns. There are a handful of words the editors really like, and some of them seem to appear virtually every time. Or, at least, way more often than they statistically should.
This bothers me, because it’s a tremendous missed opportunity.
Let’s take “Dre”, the “Doctor of Rap”. If I consider the demographics of “people I know who do the NY Times Crossword” and “people I know who love hip-hop”, I’m pretty sure the intersection is zero. For the crossword people to see the same artist’s name, again and again, gives a false sense of “yeah, I understand hip-hop, I always get the artist they ask about”.
But it’s okay if an every-day crossword puzzler occasionally gets stumped, or has to figure out a name by getting all the words that intersect it. This is a great opportunity to learn a fresh artist in the process. (Same for Shakespeare’s Iago, and Elia/Elie filmmaker/author, and Yale alumni, and so on.)
In alphabetical order, my overused grievance words are:
- Aar (Swiss river)
- Aloe (moisturizer)
- Alp (Swiss mountain)
- Aria (opera solo)
- Asta (dog from TV show)
- Dre (rapper)
- EMT (first aid)
- Elia Kazan (filmmaker)
- Elie Wiesel (author)
- Elis (Yale alumni)
- Ella (Fitzgerald)
- Emit (radiate)
- Epee (sword)
- Iago (villain)
- Idle (doing nothing)
- Jai-Alai (sport)
- SNL (tv show)
- SST (plane no longer used)
- TKO (ends boxing)
- Zsa-Zsa (Gabor sister)
