Schwa hits the Big Time!

[sagehen]

on 5/29/08 4:01 PM, Laurence Horn at laurence.horn at YALE.EDU wrote:

>> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
~~~~~~~~~~
Who'd a thunk it!?  Not so much that "schwa" had ventured out before, but
that there should be the means at hand to discover the occasions. What a
world we do live in!
AM

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org