Just a few months after we're born, we start learning words. Usually the first words we learn are "Mama" and "Daddy." Then we learn "eat" and "go" and "run" and "walk" and "car" and other basic words. We may not know the dictionary definitions of these words but we still know what the words mean. And sometimes, such as today, we learn that a word may not mean what we think it means. Gareth Bain's crossword today included REST as the answer to "Get some shuteye." I always thought "rest" referred to lying down without going to sleep. The first definition of the verb "rest" in Merriam-Webster is "To get rest by lying down, especially SLEEP." Huh! "Shuteye," by the way, dates from 1899.
"'America's largest classroom' network...or, read as a plural, a hint to the theme answers" is PBS. Four answers are P-B phrases: PADDINGTONBEAR, PATBENATAR, PHONEBOOTH and PRIMABALLERINA. What, no peanut butter? The crossword also included poetic words (ANON, OER), foreign words (AIME, ISLA) and brand names (BUD, LASIK, NOKIA, OREO). *Sigh*
Eight answers in the Daily News crosswords included the letters "MA" (e.g., DRAMA, LLAMA, HAMANEGGS) and were arranged in pairs so that there was an "MA" with another "MA" beneath it; the second M was beneath the first A and the M's and A's were within circles. The circled letters represented the theme answer STEPMOM ("Wicked relative of Cinderella").
The 13x13 NEA crossword is, as usual, nothing to speak of: No answers of more than seven letters and no theme or unusual words. But it did include the name of Norwegian poet/dramatist Henrik IBSEN. There was an actor and comedian who was born James Bateman and was most famous for his three years as part of the cast of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968-71). He took his stage name from Henrik Ibsen and became Henry Gibson. The two names are what is known in linguistics as oronyms: phrases which sound identical when pronounced without a pause between the words. Another example of oronyms: "I scream" and "ice cream."
