Here are a few little odds and ends I’ve been meaning to talk about that only call for a few words apiece! If only there were someplace to put short messages online…seems like I half-remember something like that…was it X-Threads? Oh, well, probably not important.
ITEM! Thank you for all of the wonderful responses to The Journal of Wordplay #2, and if I haven’t given you a personal reply yet, rest assured that one is coming. That goes for submitters as well as readers! I already have a few good submissions for issue #3, so let’s make this official here: the submission deadline for The Journal of Wordplay #3 is October 20, 2023.
ITEM! Why, yes, I did have to apologize for being slow on replies around the launch of the first issue, too. I suspect this may become a pattern, but I’ll do my best to keep it under control.
ITEM! The crossword community had some reason to celebrate the #1 weekend for Blue Beetle. Because that probably means a higher profile for its star, Xolo Maridueña. XOLO is a crossword-useful word, because it has an uncommon letter in an unusual position followed by three common ones. (“Xolo” is also sometimes used as a nickname for the Xoloitzcuintle, a breed of hairless dog. But as of this week, Mr. Maridueña is better known.)
As I may’ve said before, crossword designers are sensitive both to the uncommon letters, which can lead to more unusual vocabulary, and the common ones, which provide better “mortar” to keep the puzzle together. They liked it when the X-MEN got big, too.
I’d love to talk more about crossword-useful additions to the world of pop culture, but in the short term, I’ll just wish Maridueña and his costars the best as they seek another kind of justice on the picket line. I do hope there’s movement on the strike front by the end of the year, or I may run out of pop culture to talk about!
ITEM! My favorite word of the week is “churnalism,” a portmanteau of churn and journalism, meaning the kind of journalism that’s quickly churned out by rewriting press releases or other people’s articles. It’s not new-new; it looks to have been created around 2008 or so. But today’s the day it first crossed my desk.
ITEM! Some time back, I cited a few “lost works” of wordplaying literature that had dropped off the official radar. The more modern of these pieces were Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo (not quite lost, but in very limited supply), Satire: Veritas and my personal favorite, Zeus in Therapy. I am pleased to report that since then, I have been in contact with people who have promised to supply me copies of all these works, and I’m starting to look into official reprinting as a possibility. Thanks muchly to my helpers here: you know who you are.
In the meantime, the rest of you can get a peek at Satire: Veritas here. I haven’t gone through all of it myself yet, but as an experiment in constrained nonsense literature, it has its own kind of hypnotic beauty.
RE: VERITAS/SATIRE
James Morrow wrote a satirical book I like verty much -- THE CITY OF TRUTH -- A place where
all the citizns must tell the truth. The name of the cityy, of course, is Veritas. i taught the book
as part of my course on the history of comedy, explring the relationship of truth telling to some kinds of comedy, esp. satire.