"Mark My Words" December 15, 2023

[MajordomoTom]

my email subject line

[escapeartist]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is SMILE. Each of the five theme answers conceals a diacritical mark or a piece of punctuation: UNTILDEATH, MISSILECOMMAND, KHLOEKARDASHIAN, TESLASHOWROOMS, MOONCOLONY. Each of these marks appears in one clue: SPAIN/ tilde, MOCHA/comma, IDOLS/dash, LEIS / slash, EVEN/colon. The first letters of these answers spell the contest answer.

A big turnout this week--2035 entries, about 2/3 correct. We heard from some solvers who asked whether a smiley emoji or emoticon would be accepted as the answer. The answer is yes, though our randomly drawn winner spelled out the word. 195 of you got partway down the road and answered PUNCTUATION. Also big votes for EMOTICON (77) and EMOJI (58) plus MORSE CODE (18), MUSIC (12), NUMBERS (10), COMPUTER CODE (5) and various others.

Congrats to this week's winner: Robert Luzar of Huntsville, Ala.!

[hoover]

Living in Texas where approximately 30% of the residents speak Spanish*, I have a quibble in that ⟨ñ⟩ is not an ⟨n⟩ with a TILDE; it is an EÑE (also spelled ENYE by us bolillos), a separate letter in its own right.**

* That sounds low to me, so I think they are counting those who speak primarily Spanish at home. If you add in the number who speak any Spanish at all, the number is probably much higher.

** TIL that since 2010, ⟨ll⟩ in Spanish is no longer a single letter but a digraph.

[MajordomoTom]

when I lived in South Texas, ch, rr, ll and "eN-yeah" were separate letters of the alphabet, so there were 30 versus the 26 in the "English" alphabet.

Which, of course, doesn't count the æ letter which is truly a single letter and appears in things like Encyclopædia, æon, and æsthetic, and others.

[The XWord Rabbit]

Do you remember the Belmont Stakes of 1973? (The Rabbit guesses not too many of you, since that WIN, PLACE & SHOW meta of the not-too-distant past was a challenge for some.) In any event, Secretariat won that race by 31 lengths. (Remember him? Yes, the Rabbit thought you might.) It was an amazing performance that was recreated in the 2010 film of the same name.

Well, this week’s run for the rabbit holes was a lot like that race. There was a bit of early jostling about EMOTICONS and EMOJIS, but Cruise Director Bob opened up a very early lead and breezed to the finish line with a nomination. You can read his sorry tale of googling (including an education in the Kardashian family) here: Post #306. And thanks, Bob, for going where other Muggles feared to tread.

Time for your Rabbit to have his dinner, but first he would like to offer you a caret [sic] or two:
^It’s Victor Borge with a Lesson in Phonetic Punctuation.^ Until next week, then…

[Flying_Burrito]

Got Smile but to be honest I never thought of the emoticon (and learned on this board something new about its origin). Two Amazon packages were by my desk, so I have to thank Jeff Bezos' logo (and my wife purchasing propensity) for subconsciously accelerating the meta process and answer.

[boharr]

smile2.jpg


Do you remember the Belmont Stakes of 1973? (The Rabbit guesses not too many of you, since that WIN, PLACE & SHOW meta of the not-too-distant past was a challenge for some.) In any event, Secretariat won that race by 31 lengths. (Remember him? Yes, the Rabbit thought you might.) It was an amazing performance that that was recreated in the 2010 film of the same name.


rsz_50pctnominee.jpg
Well, this week’s run for the rabbit holes was a lot like that race. There was a bit of early jostling about EMOTICONS and EMOJIS, but Cruise Director Bob opened up a very early lead and breezed to the finish line with a nomination. You can read his sorry tale of googling (including an education in the Kardashian family) here: Post #306. And thanks, Bob, for going where other Muggles feared to tread.

Time for your Rabbit to have his dinner, but first he would like to offer you a caret [sic] or two:
^It’s Victor Borge with a Lesson in Phonetic Punctuation.^ Until next week, then…

I was actually at the Belmont when Secretariat performed that feat. Memorable is an understatement.

[fivehalves]

I have to say, as soon as I figured out the meta I was like "oh noooo", because I have an unpublished non-meta crossword that uses basically that exact same joke as part of the theme. Except, of course, Gaffney did it better.

[OliviaL]

Living in Texas where approximately 30% of the residents speak Spanish*, I have a quibble in that ⟨ñ⟩ is not an ⟨n⟩ with a TILDE; it is an EÑE (also spelled ENYE by us bolillos), a separate letter in its own right.**

This was my rabbit hole! ENYA (35D) is ENYE with one letter change. I spent quite some time trying to find alternate terminology for the other punctuation marks before I found the real metanism.

[OliviaL]

Also, I submitted SMILE, but wrote here that I couldn’t figure out how my answer fit the prompt. @Joe Ross PMed me “:)” and I had a good laugh when it finally all clicked!!

[JRS51]

smile2.jpg


Do you remember the Belmont Stakes of 1973? (The Rabbit guesses not too many of you, since that WIN, PLACE & SHOW meta of the not-too-distant past was a challenge for some.) In any event, Secretariat won that race by 31 lengths. (Remember him? Yes, the Rabbit thought you might.) It was an amazing performance that was recreated in the 2010 film of the same name.


rsz_50pctnominee.jpg
Well, this week’s run for the rabbit holes was a lot like that race. There was a bit of early jostling about EMOTICONS and EMOJIS, but Cruise Director Bob opened up a very early lead and breezed to the finish line with a nomination. You can read his sorry tale of googling (including an education in the Kardashian family) here: Post #306. And thanks, Bob, for going where other Muggles feared to tread.

Time for your Rabbit to have his dinner, but first he would like to offer you a caret [sic] or two:
^It’s Victor Borge with a Lesson in Phonetic Punctuation.^ Until next week, then…

Thank you, Rabbit, for sharing the video! Victor Borge was brilliant and I have always considered this a masterpiece!!

[Colin]

@The XWord Rabbit
Thank you for sharing this brilliant clip of Victor Borge. I remember him from b&w tv days watching with mum & dad… he was brilliant!!! (Can you hear him reading this?!) Timing and delivery were pure arts. Not that they aren’t today, but VB’s unique performances have amazing shelf-life.
Enough to make everyone’s Holidays very Happy!

[ship4u]

Time for your Rabbit to have his dinner, but first he would like to offer you a caret [sic] or two:
^It’s Victor Borge with a Lesson in Phonetic Punctuation.^ Until next week, then…

A perfect finale for this week's meta!

At the risk of revealing my age, I remember seeing that performance of Victor Borge on black and white TV. It's humor has stood the test of time!

[Tom Wilson]

I also graduated from CMU twice — undergrad and grad!

Don't leave me out of the Tartan reunion! I went to the Business School there (then called the Graduate School of Industrial Administration) in the latter part of the '80's, while my ex-wife was getting her PhD in the School of Computer Science. Only school in the country to offer a scholarship for playing the bagpipes!
[/quote
I remember GSIA! Several of my classmates were bagpipers (they were Math majors). I have wonderful memories of hearing bagpipes playing in the early morning hours as students were heading to class.

Can I claim partial CMU lineage? My son graduated as a directing major from the School of Drama in 2014. I have wonderful memories from my visits to that amazing city and beautiful campus.

[steveb]

I finished the grid today; no clue yet on the meta. But I have an excuse. I had open-heart surgery Monday for an aortic aneurysm. I just got out of the cardiac ICU today. I’m feeling much better and on the road to recovery.

I would post a picture but I can’t figure out how to do it on my phone.

Good for you and good luck with your recovery! I am six weeks out from open heart (on Halloween of all days) and can feel your pain! Keep with the recovery plan and keep up with distractions like crosswords and metas. I made it with through without losing a three year streak on Duolingo so I feel lucky! Lisa solves the metas usually anyway, so no problem there. But we have done LOTS of crosswords the past six weeks.

Don (and Lisa!)

Thanks for your encouragement! I came home yesterday and I'm feeling pretty good (not taking any pain meds). I am soooo glad not to be trying to sleep in hospital beds anymore.

This morning, I solved last week's meta from a printed copy, so even though I couldn't submit for the mug, I'm counting it for my streak - which is currently only a single-digit number.

[MajordomoTom]

proud new grandpa showing off ... this will be our Christmas card this year.