In today’s Frederick (MD) News-Post is some wire service crossword. The clue is “Livy’s Route.” The answer is four letter, and I have the first two:
IT __ __
Livy the historian? He had a route?
Grumble. I am going to take a nap.
You’re probably overthinking it. It’s probably just the Latin word for ‘route’.
Which is ITER.
It’s a crossword convention to use a proper name as a tag to indicate that the answer is in another language – thus, “Livy’s route” (instead of “Route: Lat.”). The name might be of an actual person, or a stereotypical one associated with a particular nationality (Fifi, Pedro, Giovanni). Thus “NYET” might be clued as either “Ivan’s refusal” (general name) or “Gorbachev’s veto” (specific name).
I was sort of looking to make VIA work, but then I got a brain cramp. Thank you all.