Sixes and Sevens - July 2011

July was a juicy puzzle and much good clean fun, up until this month's humdinger tacky-attack. And no, I'm not talking about 17A's EBOOKS ("Modern Library edition of So Be OK (hyphenated)" = SO BE OK&nsbp;anagram).

Which, side note, that was really pushing it, Richard E. Maltby Jr! This isn't the New York Times crossword. You can't just ETAIL and ERATE your way through the grid. This is why we come to the cryptic. We come for real words, even obscure words (29A NEPHRIC, "Degenerate pincher of a kidney (7)" = PINCHER anagram). But these e- prefixes in a cryptic? Too soon, Maltby! Too soon. And thanks for indicating that it's a hyphenated word. Nobody cares!

This month's extra puzzling twist was that the six- and seven-letter answers were unnumbered. Straightforward. Knocked this out with steady progress at my usual casual three day pace.

Particular favorites included 16A's glorious DOPPELGANGER from "I can see myself here, having gone and grappled with intermarriage (12)" = GONE + GRAPPLED anagram (pulled that one down right away) (anagrams are my strongest suit) and 1D's INFIDEL from "I don't believe it's an infield foul!" = INFIELD anagram.

And then we come to the unpleasant matter of This Month's Tacky Harper's Cryptic Clue. This month it was what turned out to be 34A: "Chastity maintains these holy songs get placed around the start of Easter." Tried building off AVES a couple times before I remembered that there's a special word for what we sang in church. Special thanks to my mom for the assist on: HYMNS. Toss in an E for start of Easter and we're left with HYMENS as a synonym for "chastity maintains." Hrm.



I logged a lot of hours with Our Bodies Ourselves during adolescence. I also had The What's Happening to My Body Book for Girls. I also had and still have a female body. So I'm well-equipped to offer insight on this point. Carol Roye sums it up nicely:

As nurse practitioner it is not so easy to tell whether a girl is a virgin, because hymens are so varied. If there is not much of a hymen I have no way of knowing what happened to it. Was it a boyfriend or a bicycle? Or, perhaps, this girl did not have much tissue there to begin with.

Wikipedia says it better:

Virginity testing [inspection of the hymen] is a very controversial practice, both because of its implications for tested girls and because it is not accurate.[1] It is degrading and considered a violation of human rights by Amnesty International[2] and is illegal in many countries.

This clue resonates with bad "bloody sheet" notions of female purity and women as property. Stoning is still a legal sentence for women convicted of adultery in countries that enforce Islamic Sharia law. "Honor killing" is still a very real repercussion for women who, oh, say, get married without an intact hymen.

My rejoinder, matching tacky for tacky: "Jewish bodily impurity before head was cut off by thin film (8)"

Ring in the New Year - January 2011

Not long after I completed this puzzle I joked with an acquaintance about how "ha ha there's always some clue that's tacky or mildly offensive in the Harper's cryptic" and the acquaintance, being an Enneagram 5 of precise intellect, well. He wa'n't ha'in' it. At least, not without some hard evidence to support what was otherwise slander against a venerated print title.

I had no example at the ready save the one in this puzzle, but vowed to make a better catalogue for future reference. Thus I would confidently say to precise Enneagram 5s or smarmy Enneagram 4s or confused Enneagram 7s, "to the blog! All the answers you seek are there! A full catalogue!"

The twist in this puzzle relies on specific knowledge of Wagner's Ring cycle. Either you know it cold, or, as the puzzle description puts it, "Some googling may be required." Strike 1 for patronizing us, Richard E. Maltby. Some "googling" was definitely required by this puzzler.

Unclued theme answers included SIEGFRIED, GOTTERDAMMERUNG, DAS RHEINGOLD, DIE WALKURE, SIEGMUND (or not?) (more on that later), BRUNHILDE, SIEGLINDE, ALBERICH, ERDA, FRICKA, and WOTAN. Easy enough if you're a big Rings fan. For the rest of us, there's Wikipedia.
Of course, had it been esoteric knowledge of Lord of the Rings then obviously I'd be kvelling and singing operatic songs of praise to this puzzle. To each her own. But don't give me this smirky "go google [sic] it" instruction. This is a puzzle, not medical school! Strike 2, Maltby.

And on that note, we humble Googlers and Wikipeders were left with ambiguity in 1D, which could either be SIEGMUND or SIEGRUNE based on other fill and on Wikipedia's list of characters from the Ring cycle. Perhaps to an opera all-star it's "so clearly" one or the other, but I went with SIEGMUND since he just sounds more important. But that's probably mostly because of Sigmund Freud.

So it was guess-times on this puzzle, which, it's always a Complete Drag when you have to guess in a cryptic. The point of a cryptic is that satisfying mechanical feeling of interlocking parts in your brain when you solve a clue and can know for certain that it's correct, in a way that's different and also the same as how NY Times crossword solutions are so often governed on instinct and precise yet inarticulable knowledge of the Heart and Mind of Will Shortz. All m'solvers out there, you know what I'm talking about.


The tacky clue this month was 31D: "From Indian woman, not wife: quiet kind of racket (6)." Several attempts were made building off of RANI, which is of course the Indian word for queen and a frequent NY Times crossword answer. But no, the clue did not indicate a woman from the Indian subcontinent, but rather a Native American SQUAW. Remove the W à la "not wife" and add SH from "quiet" and we're left with SQUASH racket. Ugh.

Seems that "squaw" was first identified as an epithet in 1976's Literature of the American Indian (quoted here), then later came to popular consciousness as an insult after Native American activist Susan Harjo appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992 and claimed that "squaw" is a derogatory term for female genitals. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the word.

Abenaki scholar Marge Bruchac has a rather defensive editorial titled Reclaiming the Word "Squaw" and as you might guess it's pro-squaw. But she adds in an addendum,

Yet, in the modern era, given the tragic history of non-Native treatment of Native American Indian women, the word "squaw" is often interpreted as an insult. For some, it represents the rape and abuse of Native women by white soldiers and fur traders; for others, it represents the prejudice experienced by reservation Indians.

Thus, regardless of the actual etymology, it's a word used to demean or insult women. Even the people who like it don't like it. Tacky, Maltby. Strike 3.