Word: maleska
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...Farrar was succeeded by Will Weng, and then by Eugene Maleska, a New York City school teacher. I remember being pleased to read of Maleska's accession, for I knew his name as a Dell puzzle constructor. But Maleska was a conservative chap, a one-man Academie Francaise of English. He seemed to believe that the language had frozen decades before. Cultural references tended toward opera trivia and the novels of long-dead white males...
...management of the crossword franchise was severely traditional as well. On Sundays, for example, the Times devotes an entire page to puzzles. Maleska's selection of puzzles never varied. On top was a large, stately crossword, as imposing and exciting as Queen Victoria's bustle. Beneath it was one of three puzzles: an acrostic (twice as much work for half the fun), a diagramless crossword (you're given the clues but not the grid - why?) and, once in four weeks, Mel Taub's Puns and Anagrams - sort of a kindergarten cryptic. You never saw the features that made Games magazine...
...Enter Shortz, nearly 40 years younger than Maleska, and eager to revive the Times' most carefully studied page. A John XXIII to Maleska's Pius XII, Shortz embraced the modern: slang, hipper pop references, more devious wordsmanship. He also instituted a sliding scale of difficulty for the puzzle week: the easiest one on Monday and Tuesday, the most challenging on Friday and Saturday...
...spelled out in Wordplay. What you won't learn in the movie is that the puzzle's constructor, Jeremiah (Jerry) Farrell - a Butler University professor of, what else, mathematics - had submitted a simpler version to the Times for election Day 1980, with CARTER and REAGAN as the interchangeable words. Maleska turned it down, supposedly asking, "What if John Anderson wins?" (I still shake my head in wonder at Farrell's brilliance, and Maleska's myopia.) Sixteen years later, Farrell revived and revised the idea. Though Shortz typically revises about half of the clues in an average puzzle, and did tweak...
...Sunday morning. The Intern and his companion were sitting in a cafe where everybody was unnaturally quiet. It was an outdoor cafe and there were tiny birds in the plants. The Intern scanned the stack of papers at his feet and thought about doing the crossword puzzle. Eugene T. Maleska wanted him to guess what one-sixth of a drachma was in Roman numerals, but the Intern had little desire to. The Intern ordered another croissant from a waitress who told him to cut the crappy insincere panderings when he asked if she was having a nice morning. The Intern...
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