Jeebus Christ on a pogo stick. Them young whippersnappers don’t know shit anymore!
Just yesterday somebody on a local FB group posted a 1910 newspaper article about a days-long Chautauqua held in the community and I had NO idea what the fuck a “Chautauqua” was.
I’m 60 and didn’t get it at first. In my defense, it was part of a longer cryptic clue, the answer was a word I’d never heard before, and I was never a reader of Pogo.
So, the online archive goes back basically to Will Shortz’s start (the last months of 1993), which means anything I looked at was comparing Shortz to Shortz. That said, I finished some of those Friday and Saturday puzzles in 10 minutes or less, so I wonder if he started out way easier than Maleska and then pushed the difficulty back up.
That’s fair, but as someone that’s only been really doing them for the last 5 years or so I have to defer to someone like Rex Parker who is pretty adamant that even within that time period they have gotten easier.
My record fastest Friday is 8:32 and Saturday is 11:11. From what I’ve read those kind of times just wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago, especially for a relative novice like me. It doesn’t seem like “I’ve gotten better” can account for all of the change from “struggling for 60+ minutes” to “filling in under 12 minutes”. That’s a definite reduction in difficulty.
That’s interesting. Maybe I should go try some of those and see how they compare to my current times for end-of-the-week puzzles.
And in case anyone is unaware, the NYT puzzle is supposed to be easiest on Monday and hardest on Saturday, with Sunday’s puzzle being at a Wednesday or Thursday level.
I’m just now 67. Pogo was my grandparents’ comic strip. And maybe a bit of my parents’ in their youth. It was an antiquity when I was a child.
The persona accusing the whippersnappers is about 120 years old.
If you want a real challenge, try doing the crossword puzzles in The Saturday Review. It’s been a while since I’ve printed out and done puzzles from the 1920’s and 1930’s but the references in those are really obscure to the modern mind.
Regarding the NYT puzzles, my local paper prints the daily and Sunday puzzles and I usually manage to complete them, although I occasionally have to look up a reference online.
Take a look at Dec 3 or Dec 4 of 1993, for example. In no way do they look like Friday/Saturday.
I noticed just the other day that the last Kelly-original Pogo strip was published on November 26th 1972, one day after I was born. But I have access to all of these that have been published. When you are reading lots of the strips back-to-back, the eye dialect gets really tedious really fast.
I’ll give that a try. Just for fun I just loaded up todays’ date (9/15) from 1995, and had to get some help. Too many pop-culture clues like “Coach Parseghian” Ara and “70s-80s Sitcom Actress” PamDawber. The rest was pretty doable - certainly not impossible. That was a Friday.
ETA: OK, did that 12/4/93 (Saturday) one in 15 minutes. Might have been harder except, amazingly, that same 70’s era actress appeared again! (first name only this time). So if things were harder in the past, it certainly wasn’t in the winter of 1993.
I remember seeing that first clue (about a coach) multiple times, I think because it’s an interesting combination of letters.
ARA was often the coach in old puzzles, now it’s usually the constellation.
The crossword puzzle is a relatively recent invention, usually said to have begun as we know them in the 1910s as “word-cross puzzles”. Really. Simon & Schuster, the giant, tony publisher of the most respectable books, got its start by being the first to print entire crossword puzzle books, and was snooted by the elite for being culture-less Jews making money off idiots. Then the craze hit and the money rolled in and Carly Simon was born.
Pre-WWII crossword puzzles were monstrously difficult, full of the most obscure words that creators could pry out of old dictionaries. Maybe with the kind of effort over a year the OP put in I could learn how to do them, but they’re like getting beat over the head with a frying pan.
Having puzzles with themes and fun clues and popular culture references took a long time to evolve. Shortz definitely played the biggest part in this, but he found he had to make slow, incremental changes because those who had learned the trick of solving the old puzzles didn’t want to have to learn anything new. Yes, they were very much a monoculture, very much like the Times audience. Getting clues in from other cultures has been a pitched battle inside the community for the past couple of decades. I do the Sunday puzzles from collections the Times puts out and the “timely” references from a decade or two ago are already lost on me.
Sholtz is still technically the head of the Times’ puzzle department, but he suffered a series of serous strokes last year and will have to be replaced soon. Puzzles make more money online for the Times than most of their news reporting so they’ll go on forever. And pity whatever poor soul gets the job of replacing him and making those necessary changes.
I’m 45 and this clue meant nothing to me, even after I looked it up. If the crosses didn’t give me all 4 letters, I’d be doomed.
There’s a thread of cryptic clues to solve here on the board, if you are interested:
That’s like me—I have a lot of the collections, mainly because no nearby paper publishes the Sunday puzzles. That’s good actually, since I don’t have to wait a week to do another.
I’m currently working on puzzles in one of the omnibus collections of 200 puzzles, which are from 1997 to 2009, and some of the “timely” clues from those days might have been easy then. Now, I find that I’m really having to reach back in my memory, in a “Gosh, I kinda-sorta remember that [event, music, movie, etc.], but damned if I can remember exactly what the answer is.”
There is a knack to solving crosswords, particularly NYT ones. If you have a choice of answers, the one with the most vowels will usually be the correct answer, because it makes building the puzzle easier. And there are so many words that are used over and over again that you might as well memorise them.
Melissa Balmain even wrote a short story using as many of thes words as possible. Here you go with My Crosswrod Life, by Melissa Balmain.
Diary of a Crossword Fiend: “My Crossword Life,” by Melissa Balmain
Sometimes I see a clue now and I’m like, “Oof, that’s not going to age well.” Not in the usual sense, but in the “nobody will remember this” sense.
Solvers in 20 years are going to assume The Bear was the biggest show in the world just by how much Ayo Edibiri shows up.