Schwa hits the Big Time!

[Laurence Horn]

>On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:33 PM, sagehen <sagehen at westelcom.com> wrote:
>>
>>   Schwa can be found peeking out from the gloom of arcana into the full glare
>>  of general culture (it says here) with this week's edition of /The Nation./
>>  It appears in Puzzle No.3128.  Frank Lewis gives it a *very* broad hint in
>>  the  clues.  I don't pay much attention to the NYT-type  puzzle any more,
>>  but I have, over the years, & I don't think I've ever run across "schwa" in
>>  any other puzzle.
>
>Here's a list of 15 appearances of "schwa" in the NYT puzzle since
>1994, with clues:
>
>http://www.xwordinfo.com/Word.aspx?word=schwa
>
>The geographical clues are interesting. I like "Sound in the middle of
>Italy" and "Either end of Alaska" -- "'Long Island' sound" not so much
>(which sound?).
>
But the last is in fact the most elegant clue of the bunch, playing
off "Long Island Sound"; schwa is in fact *a* "Long Island" sound,
and nowhere is it stipulated by the clue that it's *the* "Long
Island" sound.

(It loses a bit, I grant, by the quotes around "Long Island" in the
clue, which makes it a bit too easy to figure out what's at issue
without navigating the garden path, as opposed to the Italy and
Alaska clues with no quotation marks.)

LH

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