Cluing SAL: A Top Nine
The name appears with odd frequency in the Ubercross grids.
Certain words crop up again and again when you’re making puzzles. Everyone knows about OREO, but some are even commoner: the big three in the last thirty years of New York Times crossword history are ERA, AREA, and ERE. In Cruciverb, which tracks other newspaper puzzles as well, it’s ERA, AREA, and ORE.
My system prevents words from repeating too often, but not always, especially between subsections of a grid, so I have a lot of data about what words I keep coming back to. Two are tied for first place, with (appropriately) 26 appearances each. One is ERE, which is #3 in NYT usage and #5 on Cruciverb. But the other, oddly, is SAL, which is tied for #198 in NYT use.
I can’t even say I have a special love for the name. I do have a well-loved Aunt Sally, but we never call her by the shortened version. Its letters are common, but even so. In order to keep the clues from getting too monotonous, I had to explore all things SAL and change things up a bit. So here are my picks (in a particular order, but I’m already rethinking some of their placements):
If you like crosswords, you like brain stuff and want the world to be smarter. If you want the world to be smarter, Sal Khan’s achievements in education are important to you.
Fun fact: I was once in the running to share a screen with Sal Vulcano: I interviewed to be a guest on the dad-jokey game show The Misery Index, which he did with his costars on the better-known, longer-running Impractical Jokers. I think I was a little too shy to be what they were looking for, but it was fun to try.
Crosswords love Sal Mineo, and I get it…Rebel Without a Cause was a great movie, if you were a teen in the 1950s. After that, Mineo’s main claims to fame are Exodus, a ridiculously long historical drama I promise you haven’t seen, a bit part in a Planet of the Apes film, a reference to him in Grease, and being the Sean Bean of his day—you kind of knew after a while that his characters weren’t gonna make it to the end of the movie. I’m being a bit generous out of deference to Rebel, but I expect younger constructors to skip right past him.
Sal is Spanish for “salt.”
Having worked in webcomics myself, I have a devil of a time deciding how widely known any long-running webcomics are, but when it comes to David Willis’s Dumbing of Age, I’ll evangelize a little. Its version of Sal Walters stands out as one of the few comics characters still using audibly Southern dialect, now that X-Men’s decided it’s too good for that. She makes me feel seen, oddly enough!
Okay, you got me: I just like the idea of crossword solvers having to ask each other the real name of The Sopranos’ “Big Pussy.”
Sal soda used to be a feature of every stereotypical American home, but once Arm & Hammer realized it could sell more boxes if the sodium carbonate was called “washing soda,” it never looked back.
“My Gal Sal” is a barely-remembered song, but it really should be noted. For one thing, it’s a seemingly empty-headed romantic ditty with a secret, rarely-heard sad ending. For another, it’s the first film song ever performed, appearing (albeit briefly) in 1927’s The Jazz Singer.
Sal Buscema is not the most famous Spider-artist of all Peter Parker’s history, but if you’re a comics nerd of a certain age, you know his work by sight.
Oh, and how could I (almost) forget Sal Paradise from On The Road? One of the best characters I had to read in high school, a ball of youthful, stupid exuberance who, like Romeo, was always a little doomed, but no less compelling for that.
