Crossplay

Playing Crossplay (The New York Times ) with our son Ben has turned Elaine and me into hardened criminals of this Scrabble-like board.

The beauty (?) of Crossplay is that you can try improbable combinations of letters, and if they don’t spell a real word, the app lets you know, and you can try something else. So you might as well try.

We will not be STOPT. Even if Ben is TALAR than we are.

*

I realized after writing the sentences above that playing this game is like walking down a street testing car doors to find one that’s unlocked.

Word Matters is back

The Merriam-Webster podcast Word Matters disappeared in 2022 after 100 episodes. I just discovered that it’s back, or sort of back, with four episodes in 2025 and 2026. I’ve listened to just one, “The Making of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , Twelfth Edition.” Highly recommended. And, yes, I have the twelfth on a nearby shelf.

Related reading
Word Matters on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (They’re wrong) : A handful of other OCA Word Matters posts

Owner’s manuals, free

A great website, though it makes no claim to be complete: Car Owner’s Manuals.

No surprise to see the 2026 Toyota RAV4 manual among the most popular — the vehicle is like an operating system with a car attached. And besides, the manual is missing from the Toyota website. Having a searchable PDF as an alternative to the poorly indexed print manual is hugely helpful.

See also ManualsLib.

[Should that be owners’ manuals ? You’re welcome to overthink it for me.]

The Heidi Overton window

I’m losing a good ninety minutes this morning watching what I put on for a minute before reading: a Senate confirmation hearing on C-SPAN 3 for Dr. Heidi Overton, the nominee to head the Food and Drug administration. She dodges question after question: Was the current occupant wrong when he said that acetaminophen causes autism? Was he wrong when he said that the MMR vaccine is lethal? Can he ever be wrong about something? (All real questions.)

She dodges and dodges, and dodges some more, and follows up every dodge with a thin smile.

I vote no.

A grudge against clocks

When Lucio Bordenave was fired from his job at a bank, his wife Diana, aka the missus, wanted him to work at a used-car showroom. He refused, and as it turned out, the place was being run by “a famous gang.” Lucio now supports his household, which includes doña Ceferina, an aged relative on his mother’s side, by repairing clocks and watches. But Diana isn’t crazy about that work.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

Lucio is a very patient man.

Related posts
Two passages from The Invention of Morel

EXchange name sighting

[Sheila Cabot (Lana Turner) takes a cab. From Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). Click for a larger view.]

TUxedo 5-1234 was indeed the number for San Francisco’s Yellow Cab Company. See also this post, with a 1951 movie appearance.

Related reading
All OCA Exchange name posts (Pinboard)

Le code, c’est lui

”I am the code,“ he said.

We are all living inside the theater of a madman’s mind.

Deciding that things are too hard

Michael Gorra, a recently retired Smith English professor. From The Chronicle of Higher Education :

I was teaching a Victorian novel class when “The End of the English Major,” that infamous article Nathan Heller wrote for The New Yorker, came out a few years ago. And I put the question to my students, “Is it too much to ask you to read Middlemarch ? Is it too hard?” I was really encouraged by their response, because they said, Yes, it’s hard, but we’re proud to be able to do it. They had a real sense of achievement, of having done something they hadn’t been certain they could do before they got to college.

Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do, in order to get the benefit and to be able to do it easily later. You do get better, and it does get easier, but you have to set yourself an ambitious task. Deciding that things are too hard for students, I think, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I once told students that when a job interviewer asked about a challenge they took on in college, they could say, “I once had this professor, and he assigned this huge novel, and it was over a thousand pages,” &c.

See also Natalie Wexler: “Lower Academic Standards Can Perpetuate Unfairness,” especially the section “Fish Can’t Climb Trees.”

Two related posts
On “meeting them where they are” : Parts and wholes (On reading entire books) : Teaching Bleak House

[The thousand-plus novel would have been Infinite Jest. It took a long time.]

School pictures

AI in the news: “Stanford Used A.I. to Swap Black Student for Hispanic Student in a Photo” (The New York Times, gift link).

What a typo can reveal

Women scientist is the wicker furniture of typos.

A related post
x is the y of z s (Fetterman edition)