This weekend I had the opportunity to ruminate about the self-consciously self-referential word meta for NPR's "All Things Considered" and for my language column in the Sunday Boston Globe. That's an awful lot of meta-commentary, but I've still got some more thoughts on meta, or make that meta-thoughts on meta.
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Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. So many of us learned that outrageous mouthful of a word at an early age, when it was truly a verbal milestone to be able to pronounce it without getting tongue-tied. And just saying the word is an invitation to start singing the song from the classic 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins. But how did the word come to be? When I heard the news that one of the Mary Poppins songwriters passed away last month, I set about to answer that question, taking me down many unexpected alleyways of 20th-century popular culture.
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This weekend marks the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, so let's commemorate the occasion by looking back on some words and phrases that were particularly associated with the maritime disaster.
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Today is opening day for Major League Baseball, though the only game on the schedule is in far-off Tokyo, where the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics are beginning a two-game series. But let's cast our minds back to opening day a century ago. On April 2, 1912, in a Pacific Coast League game between the Portland Beavers and the Los Angeles Angels, a pitcher uncorked his "jazz ball" — and possibly helped set into motion a chain of events that brought the word jazz together with the music it named.
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Early on in this year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, it seemed that Dan Feyer's stranglehold on the competition would finally come to an end. Instead, he mounted an unbelievable comeback to notch his third consecutive victory. Puzzlemaster Brendan Emmett Quigley joins us again with his wrap-up of the action from Brooklyn.
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Live from Brooklyn, puzzlemaster Brendan Emmett Quigley is providing exclusive commentary from the 2012 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Brendan's got the scoop on all the action at the end of the first day of competition.
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This weekend, puzzlers will come together in Brooklyn for the 35th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, organized by New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz. The reigning champ, Dan Feyer, has been described as a crossword-solving machine. But he better look out, because this time there will be competition from an actual crossword-solving machine.
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