In my adult life, I’ve mostly followed, without examination, the rule that four-letter words were the “bad” ones and should be eschewed. But I’ve begun to realize that five-letter words, at least when you’re making mini crosswords, can be villains too. A year or so ago, I started constructing 5X5 crosswords for a friend who was recovering from heart surgery and, I presumed, needed entertainment as she convalesced. I solved the Wordle and used that word as the anchor each day. I have a couple of cruciverbalist apps that suggest five-letter candidates to fill gaps. But lately I’ve found myself wallowing in unacceptable suggestions, ones that would fail the so-called breakfast test of crossword construction, words or names people can’t face before their first cup of coffee. For example: Adolf, bimbo, boner, bowel, dildo, enema, farts, feces, gonad, G-spot, hymen, kegel, labia, mucus, Nazis, ozena (disease of the nose in which the bony ridges and mucous membranes waste away), pe...
Getting old. Not since my teens have I felt such angst. At my age, though, I suppose it’s called agita. And whereas people care about adolescent angst and write novels exploring it, old-age agita is a bore for everyone, including the sufferer. There’s the stress of doctor’s appointments and tests, which fill your calendar, as workdays and social events once did, and any of them may foretell the cause of your death. There’s the lost word or name that signals dementia. There’s the anguish over friends who have died and the sorely missed opportunities to be with them. There’s the horrifying knowledge that if you compliment a baby or dog on the street, the owner of that baby or dog receives your words with dread, fearing you may prolong the encounter. There’s the even more horrifying sense that when you talk to your children, whom you love beyond measure and desperately want to connect with, they subtly steel themselves for your inevitably irrelevant or trite or tedious or, worse, ove...
You may be able to quit going to the office when you retire, but the toxicity of work lasts long after the paychecks stop. Last night I dreamed I had to copyedit an eight-page paper for Vladimir Putin. He was sitting at a long table lined with uniformed men. As I leaned over his right shoulder to show him the manuscript, I noticed he was wearing a hearing aid held in place with an American dime. But the most vivid thing was the nauseating deja vu that overwhelmed me—the humiliation of being forced into fawning servility, which infused my working days as a female copy editor and reporter in an old-school corporation with a set-in-stone hierarchy. And there’s something about behaving like a no-good, scum-sucking, nose-picking, boot-licking, sniveling, groveling, worthless hunk of slime* that does something to your self-confidence. *Thanks, Al Yankovich
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