User talk:AdamHelpsOut/Crosswordese

Hello! Put suggestions here for things.

All caps for crossword entries

I think we should follow crossword convention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by AdamHelpsOut (talk • contribs) 02:54, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Geography

There are a number of ways we could break down geography. Major groupings like Cities, Mountains, Rivers, etc. might make sense, though there's some crosswordese that could fall into multiple categories (e.g. ERIE, URAL). Could start with a large list and sort from there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Crawsomi (talk • contribs) 02:57, 27 September 2020 (UTC) I think that we can say that things are mostly x bit of geography; for example, ERIE is mostly a lake and URAL is mostly a mountain. Mcavoybickford (talk) 11:08, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Definitions

Wonder if it's worth like seeing how sources define crosswordese? Some I found:

• "short, difficult words that often appear in crosswords" (Shortz, 2004: 806 [1])
• "words most solvers encounter only in puzzles" (Rosen & Kurzban, Random House Puzzlemaker's Handbook 1995: 226)
• "those somewhat obscure or unfamiliar words that you never heard of until you started solving crosswords" (Norris, 2009: 5 [2])
• "esoteric terms encountered in crossword puzzles" (Hambrick et al., 1999) doi:10.1037/0096-3445.128.2.131

Umimmak (talk) 03:01, 27 September 2020 (UTC) ETA links. Umimmak (talk)

I feel like Shortz and Norris agree in their definitions but Rosen & Kurzban and the esoteric definition are a little too broad to really be useful for creating a Wikipedia article. Mcavoybickford (talk) 12:45, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree with that, view. I've also managed to find a few more examples which might be useful to consult:

• “Everyone has a different definition of ‘crosswordese,’ ” Peter Gordon explained the other night. “To me, ‘crosswordese’ is not a word like ‘Oreo.’ Any four-letter word that has three vowels—‘aria,’ ‘area,’ ‘Aida’—is going to show up a lot in crosswords. But they’re not as bad as ‘inee’ ”—a type of African arrow poison—“because that word no one has ever heard of. The only reason you know that word is if you do crosswords.” [3]

• Crossword puzzles are infamous for featuring ridiculously unknown words, referred to as “crosswordese”: INEE, NENE, ANOA, ATTU are just a few examples. [4]

• In truth, crosswordese is just a subset of English words — specifically a group of words that you often run across in crosswords but don't often use when you talk to your friends and family. [5]

In particular I like how the Gordon quote is a source talking about the difficulty of finding a universally agreed-upon definition. I know plenty of people do consider ARIA, OREO, etc., to be crosswordese but I haven't found any sources whose definitions include those types of words. So it would seem we follow the sources and go with what they say. Umimmak (talk) 20:37, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Sourcing

So I talked to a friend of mine who knows more than I do about Wikipedia and he claimed that there wasn't really a way to find good sources for what is crosswordese, since it's pretty much subjectively based on our opinions although some entries do have citations from some NYT pieces trying to explain common crosswordese. Does anybody have any better ideas or alternate opinions? This feels notable and at least pretty encyclopedaic but also like something that doesn't have a lot of really published sources out there explaining what counts for us to look at. Mcavoybickford (talk) 16:54, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

@Mcavoybickford: I mean, the issue with the article as it stands is that it's based off random editors' subjective feelings. Well afterwards I went and tried to add citations to as many of the words in the list as I could making use of the NYT Wordplay articles, but I didn't yet feel comfortable removing unsourced words or adding new sourced words. But there definitely are sources for lists such as the Shortz entry in the NYT Guide, plenty of Wordplay articles, books on crossword construction/solving, etc. And plenty of other places mention a few examples of crosswordese when discussing the concept even if they don't provide a list.

However a lot of sources make use of words popular in the Maleskan era, like I can find a source saying PROA (an Indonesian boat), ESNE (an Anglo-Saxon laborer), and UNAU (a two-toed sloth) [6] are crosswordese, but PROA has only been used 4 times in the Shortz era and UNAU has not been used yet in the Shortz era (ESNE has been used 29 times and to me still feels like crosswordese). But it's this sort of distinction which I fear might not be in sources. There are sources which call INEE crosswordese (e.g., [7], [8]), but it's as far as I can tell WP:OR to note it isn't anymore. Umimmak (talk) 20:23, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

What else do we want to have?

What sort of information do we want to have in this article? I think the article should have more than just a brief introduction and a giant list, but I'm not sure what else might be germane. I think ideally I'd like to see some sort of discussion on different editor's/publication's views on crosswordese, trends over time, etc. Maybe even notable attempts to quantify it? As far as I know, Noah Veltman hasn't explicitly used the word crosswordese, but has come up with a way to measure a word's "crosswordiness" ([9], secondary source: [10])? This being Wikipedia we'd have to follow what sources have written about crosswordese, but it might be worth trying to look for information about crosswordese other than lists of examples. Umimmak (talk) 20:46, 28 September 2020 (UTC)