Word: crosswords
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...streets are tightly packed and the sidewalks obstructed with signs and display cases. Bright commerce battles an overall mood of grey and white, the theme derived from the cool and erratically rainy sky overhead, taken up by the architecture--white panelled, glassed to reflect that sky, blocky as the crossword puzzles everyone works automatically--and completed in the hair, faces, gait, and sternness of the abundant elderly...
...Vladimir Nabokov published Ada, his fifteenth novel. He was then 70. In his youth he had identified and attached his name to a new species of butterfly, created the first Russian crossword puzzle, and translated Alice in Wonderland into his native tongue. Later, in the thirties, under the pseudonym V.V. Sirin, he had written what many critics consider the finest Russian novel of the century, The Gift. In the fifties, with a book called Lolita, he had put the word "nymphet" into the dictionary. Ada's masterful complexity seemed a natural culmination to the long list of novels, stories, poems...
...Exxon U.S. doesn't mean anything? The Standard Oil execs might have turned from their computers long enough to ask that of any crossword-puzzle, anagram or Scrabble buff, or one of the millions of word-minded people who might visualize, as I did, a map of our country besmirched by a big X. "Ex on U.S." is the sort of comment likely to find worldwide agreement, if not one your would wish even on a competitor...
...Central Park ("Isaac Stern always says he lives on top of Beverly Sills, because he's on a floor above us"). There they entertain (Peter is a graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking school), play bridge (Peter is a tournament champion) or just relax (Beverly can do a crossword puzzle in 20 minutes...
...Amsterdam cartoonist summed up the situation in the turbulent Arab world with a ring of rulers, each bent on doing in the next man. Reacting to the same event, a Beirut newspaper carried a cartoon showing a baffled Leonid Brezhnev trying vainly to fit the word "Arabs" into a crossword puzzle. The Soviet Communist Party leader has a good deal of company in his perplexity, particularly after the last few weeks. In addition to the coup and countercoup in Khartoum, there have been these astonishing spectacles lately...