Word: okrent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Arika Okrent is fluent in English, Hungarian, American sign language and ... Klingon. (O.K., so she has only first-level certification in Star Trek-speak.) Okrent, a linguistics scholar, spent the better part of five years perusing library card catalogs and attending colorful conferences to learn about languages created by one person and, in some cases, adopted by thousands. Her new book, In the Land of Invented Languages, chronicles the scientists, idealists and eccentrics who tried - and failed - to create the perfect parlance from scratch. TIME spoke with Okrent about defending the cranks from the critics, ordering sandwiches in Esperanto...
...Times puzzle under Shortz' aegis has some famous fans, and Wordplay has tracked down most of them. Stewart, attacking a Tuesday puzzle, says, "I'm so confident, I'm gonna do it in glue stick." Dan Okrent, a former TIME executive who was the New York Times' Public Editor, notes that the best crossword solvers are mathematicians and musicians. (This applies especially to cryptic puzzles, a British refinement of the form that was imported to America when Stephen Sondheim created 40 or so for New York magazine in the early '70s. A few years later the cryptic became a regular...
...Wordplay is every bit as smart as the Times puzzles, puzzlemakers and puzzle solvers. Creadon is a master of the suave segue-as when Okrent observes that "Using Reagle on Tuesday is like using Barry Bonds in Little League," and the film cuts to a clip of Bonds getting struck out by Mussina, leading to the star pitcher's segment...
...puzzle to which Okrent refers is one Reagle constructed for the film. The theme is Word Play, and it uses the key words hidden in new configurations: word in "neW ORDers" and "cross sWORDs," play in "PLAYa Del Mar" and "toP LAYers." We see Reagle creating the puzzle, then Shortz accepting it and finally Clinton, Stewart, Burns, Okrent and Indigo Girls solving it. The first clue is "Warhead weapon," four letters. Stewart and Burns jump on ICBM, while Clinton, who's been in charge of these things, says, "it's gotta be an ICBM or a MIRV." As the theme...
...associate in social psychology at the Harvard School of Public Health, invented the “Baseball Seminar,” a precursor to today’s national phenomenon in which players spent an imaginary $100,000 in bidding for players who amassed points in four statistical categories. Okrent, as Walker reports, was inspired to create the modern incarnation of Rotisserie by helping a close friend from the University of Michigan, where Gamson moved from Harvard, make his bids for the “Seminar...