New Three-Letter Answers (1 of 4)

Proposed additions to the puzzler's vocabulary.

What short answers have puzzles been failing to use?

I’ve been tweaking my database of “acceptable answers” for crosswords and other puzzles and wordplay stuff. Lots of times, this has meant cutting words that don’t tend to appear in 21st-century puzzles—and a few that just annoy me. (Crosswords seem to think kilometers are abbreviated KMS. They’re not! They’re abbreviated “km”! It doesn’t matter how many kilometers there are! Get this right, dadblast it!)

However, I have run into a handful of answers that data suggests have never—or almost never—appeared in “mainstream” puzzles and probably should. This week, I’ll share some of my finds on this front.

A caveat: including new terms always comes down to an editorial choice. I’m sure others would reject some of these terms and include some I’ve rejected. Still, I feel like these are worthy of consideration, at least. Call them a set of proposals.

AMV. Like ASMR, the anime music video is a genre that exploded in popularity on YouTube (and now on TikTok). Take clips from one or more anime series, set them to any music, and you’ve made an AMV. Though some AMVs raise this simple definition to high art.

An F, an H, an X. Every so often, a crossword clue will invoke a single letter:

“I got ___” (great report card news) - AN A

“Gimme ___!” (start of a cheer for the Marlins) - AN M

What makes a man moan? - AN O

I’m not saying these are fantastic short entries, but they’re serviceable enough—and if we can use those, seems like we can talk about terrible report card news, cheering for the Hornets, and what you filter out to make Texas teas.

ASD. Don’t know why puzzles have been slow to recognize this acronym for autism spectrum disorders—they snapped ADHD right up.

AXS. Competitor to Ticketmaster. And when you’re #2, you try harder.

BDE. This acronym for big dick energy means the self-contained confidence of one with nothing to prove, as opposed to the arrogant “confidence” of one who might be compensating for something. (Cockiness?) Ariana Grande coined the term when talking up her boyfriend Pete Davidson in 2018, an advertisement Davidson wasn’t entirely thrilled about. She later tried redefining it as “big diva energy,” but the former definition seems to have had more staying power.

BSB. All the Nineties kids who once sneered at their boomer parents for playing records from their teenage years over and over…are now old enough to be playing mp3s from their teenage years over and over, while those 1990s tunes make their way into movies like the Trolls series. So I think this nickname for the Backstreet Boys is on enough people’s minds to merit inclusion.

Buh. You can find this fragment in the signoff “Buh-bye” as well as the sound of a rim shot, buh dum tsss. Puzzle vocabulary has long included “partials” such as this and oom or pah as in oom-pah…

___-pah (tuba sound) [Answer: OOM]

___-dum tsss (rim shot sound) [Answer: BUH]

BUP and CBT are both notable as treatments. BUP is a drug to wean people off opoid addiction. CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, has been helpful with a large number of mental and emotional problems—it’s focused on teaching better ways of doing things rather than just underlying beliefs. In vocab lists like this, I try not to get too much into what people should know instead of what they do know. But these are two things people really should know. (And they’re learning! But they could stand to learn faster.)

CTs are in most puzzle word lists as CT scans, so we may as well start using the shorter form too.

More tomorrow!