There's an App for That
by Dan Fisher
edited by Mike Shenk
September 25, 2009


Full answers available on WSJ's crossword puzzle page or with the following week's puzzle on WSJ's online Lifestyle page.


Theme: APP + phrase = new clued phrase
APPRAISE THE BAR (22A Decide if a saloon is up to one's standards?)
APPROVING EYE (33A Favorable look?)
APPEAR FOR MUSIC (47A Show up to take in a concert?)
APPALL A BOARD (64A Give the directors shocking company news?)
APPLYING DOWN (72A Lining with feathers?)
APPROACH MOTELS(82A What a mattress salesman might do ?)
APPEND TABLES(103A Make a textbook clearer with charts?)
APPOINTMENT JAR (117A Crock used in place of a datebook?)
Without An Englishman's nifty crucimetrics, I can't swear to the percentages, but this puzzle appears to have a pronouncedly higher proportion of Ps in addition to the APPlicable ones & their crosses: PAIN (79D Aspirin target), PAL (78A Bud), EPIC POEM (23D Virgil's “Aenid.” for one) and so on. A prolific performance.


Cool Crosses: 5-in-1
Up in the top middle, we have a whole nest of women's issues. It starts with ATHENA (20A Goddess often depicted in armor) crossing HARLOT (12D Jade), wherein lies the goddess/whore dichotomy. SHE (9D Haggard classic) Who Must Be Obeyed gives us the white queen power trope. Surrounded by AN AIR (11D Have __ of mystery), the Femme Fatale stereotype slinks in from 50s noir detective novels. Modern politics has given us Title IX and the ensuing effects on ATHletic (8D School dept.) teams. We finish with the hysterical if gender-divisive definition of CATs (7D Burmese or Balinese) as “tiny women in little fur coats.” This ties together six out of 8 words, a credit to the devious minds of Messrs. Fisher & Shenk or to my having spent way too long entangled with English Departments.

A nod to ACE/MACE, (70A Top trump) crossing (59D Knight club), & ORA/ORE, (93A Man-mouse link) crossing (86D Alcoa purchase), for their symmetry.


Nomination for Word of the Week: APPaloosa.
I know it wasn't there. I kept waiting for it to trot in. In retrospect, I can't think of an appropriate phrase but you can't write about horses for 20 years and not see spots when you hear App.


News To Me (I got 'em but I didn't get 'em): 2+
OPPUGN (96D Call into question): Impugn sure, but this? I can't even follow the Wiktionary definition.

OXO (58A Big name in kitchen gadgets): As defined. Props for coming with an alternative to a tic-tac-toe clue. I have to admit the relevance when I realize we several Good Grips tools in our kitchen.
http://www.oxo.com/oxoHome.jsp

And of course the usual handful of proper nouns that formed the usual alphabet soup for me: FRAYN (50D “Copenhagen” playwright), UTA (76A Tony winner Hagen), DELIA (110A Sister of Nora Ephron), and the rest. I did know DESOTO (123A Mississippi River discoverer) from DeSoto Caverns & the DeSoto Trail. I must raise an issue with the cluing on this one. I suspect many, many people knew about the Mississippi before the Spaniards stumbled upon it. While a crossword is not the place to argue the morality of the Age of Exploration or even the legitimacy of applying one era's morals to a prior era, we can at least aim to be linguistically accurate.


Opportunities To Learn New Things & Admissions of Defeat: 0
VICTORY! Now I'm going to RAISE THE BAR to getting all of the answers without wild guesses. After the WOE of last week, I carefully groomed the surrounds on NEPALI (1D Language akin to Hindi) and DELIA until these sounded right and proved to be correct. OPPUGN remained a what-else-could-it-be from the crosses.


Commentary: OILED (27A Blotto)
In Gridlock, Matt Gaffney quotes Merl Reagle quoting Margaret Farrar on the rules for crossword puzzles, “Crosswords are an entertainment. Avoid things like death, disease, war and taxes – the subway solver gets enough of that in the rest of the paper.” [p39] In Crossworld, Marc Romano speaks of the ACPT as a weekend that is and should be “Devoid even of the possibility of nastiness.”[p155] He could be talking about puzzles themselves.

To Farrar's list I would like to add public drunkenness. As someone who recently decided to greatly reduce her alcohol intake, I have been APPalled at the amount of casual drinking on TV and in movies. It recalls the smoking prevalent in mid-century media that is now nonexistent in the same venues. I suspect directors did it for similar reasons – to give actors something to do with their hands.

Similarly, I have been struck by the number of cute terms for drunkenness that have occurred here and in That Other Puzzle. It's not the reference alone. A saloon (clue for 22A) is both part of our culture and judgment-neutral. What rankles is the levity of the words blotto, sot, and their ilk. As if it is cute to be that way. Given the glassness of my house, I gently pitch these stones with the intent of being thought-provoking rather than simply provoking.

While on the subject of niceness, my bug phobia and I could have lived without the base phrase for APPROACH MOTELS.

And on that icky note, I sign off to begin tapping my foot until Friday morning.

Katherine Walcott
Puzzle Fan