Crossword

 Crossword 

Uncle Albert gave me a crossword puzzle book for my birthday. It was labeled “medium to difficult.” “I hear these are a good way to pass the time,” he said.

     “Do you do them?” I said.

     “Never have. They’ve always seemed to me rather a low-brow endeavor,” he said.

     “Oh.”

     “But a good way to pass the time,” he said. “Or at least, so I’ve been told.”

     “Oh, I said.”

I’ve never done crossword puzzles either but not because I thought they were low-brow. They just didn’t look interesting. Why would you put words someone else gave you into a grid rather than write words of your own into a sentence, a paragraph, a story of some sort?

     But I thought I’d give it a try. I have time to pass. And I suspected Uncle Albert would ask what I thought about the book, as if I could write a review of it.

I have been trying to do a puzzle every two days. I go as far as I can the first day, and I try to finish the second. I don’t look anything up the first day. I use a search engine the second. I am learning all kinds of things but nothing yet of any value.

     Just this morning I learned that “K.C. Royals, e.g.” are alers, though that doesn’t mean beer-drinkers. I learned “What manslaughter lacks” is intent, though I probably should have known that. And I learned there is a Scandinavian language called sami. I did look that up, after the fact. The Sami are a Finno-Ugric people inhabiting Sápmi across a large part of the north of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. They’re what used to be called Lapps, but that’s become a derogatory term for some reason. Their language belongs to the same family as Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, and 35 others, including Votic, Livonian, Mansi, Mordvinic, and Urdmurt. These are languages, apparently, that are beautiful to listen to but in which no one understands anyone else.

     In the latter aspect, they differ, then, little, it seems to me anyway, from English, French, German, Russian, or Urdu.

 
04.27.18

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     In honor of her birth in Spitalfields 259 years ago, the Unmannerly Manor corrections team has offered these emendations to the introductory essay on Mary Wollstonecraft in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume 2.