Brad Ellis

@Nina I have received two heart transplants in my life, nearly 25 years apart, AND am a big fan of palindromes, and I’ve never noticed the internal “art tra.” I’m slightly ashamed. I greatly enjoyed this puzzle.

@Mass HOS — And I feel that arts interference and renaming geography as awful as that is, is meant mostly to distract us from dismantling foreign policy, media, courts, public safety and more.

@Esmerelda thanks for the image!

@CCNY : I hope this helps de-cringify the phrase, it began life as a quote from beloved New York Yankee Yogi Berra, who coined so many beautiful, nonsensical tautologies that they are sometimes called “Yogi Berra-isms.” The most famous is “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” Here’s one in long-form: asked about a new nightclub, Yogi said: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Anyway, when people use the “dejá vu” phrase, I like to give them the benefit of the the doubt that they are in on the joke.

@Spacebabe — Your research has misled you. No musician, especially an English-speaking one, would accept ‘étude’ as a word applied to Bach’s work; nor would you call Byrd’s keyboard pieces “sonatas” or Mick Jagger’s solos “arias.” ‘Étude’ is a specific kind of piece with an identifiable historic context. Fine puzzle, unsupportable clue.

@Peter blankest blankets?

@Peter BRISKEST BRISKETS?

@Gary — Yes! And I particularly enjoyed that bit of punnery. Assuming we are right, and I’m sure we are, I guess the columnists do not run their drafts by the constructors. Is that true?

@Andrew M — wow! I did almost the exact same thing, because I was derailed by the notion of “mark twain” referring to checking the river depth from a paddle steamboat, and thought “degeared” must be a room relating to that which I simply don’t know. But I always thought it could either be ER or OR nurse, and at the last minute, I switched it out.

@CaptainQuahog as a grade school student, we would take field trips to the natural history museum at Harvard. The glass blown flowers were amazing to the eyes of children, as was the entire museum!

@Ιασων Actually, I experience it too frequently. Not wanting any of my money to go to a certain unscrupulous news outlet (you know the one: it’s lost massive judgements for fraudulent reporting), I rely on digital broadcasting, which goes haywire in the rain, most often glitching and freezing, but sometimes turning into visual white noise. Also, some stations read as snow when not broadcasting. But mostly, as you suggest, it’s a thing of the past.

@CaptainQuahog — Thank you for your wonderful reply; especially the Shakespeare source. Yes, words and phrases drift, sometimes becoming contranymical to their earlier uses. I didn’t intend to come off as a scold, although rereading it, I can hear the school-marm quality in my post. “Decimate” indeed is one that happens to bump me every time I hear it. Although, of course, it never bumped me before I noticed the prefix & suffix construction, so my complaint isn’t that it’s use is slightly careless, only that the specificity is actually more interesting. That’s also how I feel about “the game’s afoot,“ since the original resonance is rich with the imagery of a rabbit racing to the briars to avoid the fox, or the fox fleeing into the woods to avoid the hounds — whereas I don’t see the connection between, say, Monopoly or poker and pedal extremities.

@Gus the word “CODA” which is the title of that fine movie is an abbreviation for Children Of Deaf Adults. I’ve seen a number of stage plays featuring Troy Kotsur, the father in CODA, and he is one of the greatest actors of his generation, hearing or deaf.

@Kate OMOO is a novel, Omoo the name of the title character, if I remember. but I also remember it as being by Robert Louis Stevenson, and I am wrong. It’s not in my complete RLS collection, so it’s somebody else. THAT is something I might need to look up!