IndyM

@dutchiris 🤣🤣🤣

@Mike Feline catty today? :)

@abelsey I agree. I don't really understand the point of whining about how hard a puzzle is (or bragging how easy it is). I like a good challenge, and the trickier, the better. For me, solving puzzles is simply the joy of wordnerddom: it's fascinating to see how constructors think and clue, and to figure out how to arrive at the answers. It also helps to have a lint trap of a memory (sometimes I don't know how I know some of the answers--and I'm old, too), and what I ultimately can't figure out is something new that I've learned.

@Daryl "Pointless and offensive profanity"?? Heaven forfend! Get thee to a fainting couch! You might want to avoid watching TV, reading literature, or just being in the company of other human beings lest your dainty ears hear something 'profane' without getting a "prior warning." I love doing crosswords, and, after I finish, I always read the Wordplay column and then check the comments. Many of the people commenting are interesting, clever, and often funny; however, I have never seen a larger contingent of whiners. I know, I know: all I need to do is scroll down and move on, which I do. And I bite my tongue. But this comment really takes the cake for priggishness, and I couldn't hold back. (How can you be from Berkeley?!)

@Han Wudi Loved your entire post, and your first paragraph made me laugh out loud. 😄

@sotto voce This is most probably reaching, but as a Manhattan girl who grew up in Lawn Guyland, ELIE seems to be Eastern Long Island Expressway--the road that takes you east to the Hamptons to escape the city. And I've read a lot of Wiesel, so that connection seems especially belabored to me, lol. I'm curious to hear what the explanation is!

@Striker She was *so* incredibly funny on Brooklyn Nine-Nine; I love her. (Like most everyone, my first guess was Handler, but when nothing was working out in that area, I happily realized that it was PERETTI.)

@Maverator New word for me as well. (And thanks to you, I learned what TIL means! 😁)

@Ms. Billie M. Spaight I absolutely adore Connections (and am really good at this puzzle), but I can understand that it may be frustrating or irritating to others.

@Jane Wheelaghan I agree: I think puzzling is good for the brain, too, and I enjoy the challenge. Bravo for being from a different culture and tackling a US-centric puzzle--I think that's great.

@HeathieJ I lived in Lithuania for five years, soon after independence (~30 years ago). I had the same experience when buying čeburekai from a street vendor: they would never tell me what kind of meat either. (It could be risky eating street food in those days, but čeburekai--and šašlykai--were worth the risk!)

@Elizabeth Connors Trolls gotta troll. /eyeroll

@Dave K. I'm old, and I remember eating FARINA as a child. My brother and I preferred PopTarts and Cap'n Crunch, which were considered 'normal' breakfast foods back in the day (late 60s/early 70s), despite all the sugar.

@sotto voce Labas! [fistbump] *All* of my relatives are from Lithuania; my cousins and I are first generation Americans. (Our parents and grandparents escaped to German relocation camps during WWII; after about seven years, they made their respective ways to New Jersey and Philly.) I loved your anecdote. :) If you have the time and the inclination, I recommend visiting the homeland--it's a lovely country. Vilnius was still quite a soviet village when I was there, but it was growing and changing rapidly--now it's really hip and modern, while still retaining all its charm and beauty.

@Mike Sounds like you're feline catty.

@Juan Pablo Same here. Sam's write-up twigged me to the Anne Frank reference, which added a deeper layer to the clue (which I felt was in no way disrespectful). I read Anne Frank's diary many times as a young girl (I'm 61 now), and it had a powerful effect on me. I then started reading more and more books about the Holocaust. I grew up in a predominantly Jewish suburb of NYC, and my young and naive mind could not grok why anyone would harbor such hatred for people like my neighbors. And here we are, experiencing the USA of 2025... (Note: I emigrated to France in the summer of 2023 because I was just too afraid of another Trump "presidency.")

@Lewis Naughty, naughty. 😈

@Andrzej You are correct: it's an organization chart. It's jargon now, and no longer an abbreviation (at least in my experience). I worked in state and federal government in emergency disaster relief, and org charts were very important to us--they denoted the chain of command, as well as our own place in the organization. In this line of work, people were always coming and going (consultants, subject matter experts, reservists, et al.), and the ORG CHART was sometimes updated weekly.

@Ms. Billie M. Spaight The game is full of red herrings. My strategy in solving it is to guess all the groups before I enter any answers. Usually I see the relationships quickly, but sometimes I get stumped on one group. I'm usually sure about at least three groups, so I enter the remaining four words first--and lo and behold, I have the answer to the purple or blue entry. My one frustration about Connections lies in ranking the groups from hardest to easiest. I'll have all four groups solved in my head before entering them, but then I have to determine the difficulty levels for each one. (I always try for a 'reverse rainbow' solve.) Sometimes what I think is easy is considered 'tricky' and vice versa. As an aside, my most favorite puzzle EVER was the Rathvons' Acrostic. Those were utterly brilliant constructions, and could be attacked with several different strategies.

@James Better call the wahmubulace! ;) *runs away*

@Xword Junkie Lithuanian here--not sure what you meant by your LOA crack... Wondering sincerely. (If that was an attempt at wit, it was not very successful. But not to worry, IMOVERIT.)

@Sam Lyons Louise was my creative writing prof in college. She was brilliant and formidable. Here's one of my very, very favorites of hers (which I came upon by accident in The Yale Review, which I happened to leaf through in a magazine shop near Lincoln Center in NYC, while waiting to get on line for a new French film...): <a href="https://yalereview.org/article/lamium" target="_blank">https://yalereview.org/article/lamium</a>

@Sam Lyons I definitely remember Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee, but I crushed hard on him as Remy McSwain in "The Big Easy," sigh.

@Nora Yeah, BOLT is very familiar to me--I'm surprised (in a sincere way) that others did not know this. But maybe it's because I live on a steady diet of BBC fare...

@sotto voce I agree with you: it is baffling. Also, Neal's location says Chicago, so maybe there's some kind of explanation specific to Chicagoland...

@IndyM (Sorry for my double post [twice the groan...]. I didn't think this one went through.)

@BJ I started working in emergency management in NYC during the COVID crisis (before the vaccine existed and during the lockdown), so my entire world was consumed by COVID for about three years of 60-80-hour work weeks. In the beginning, we definitely used RONA as shorthand. I myself noticed the eventual disappearance of that word a year or so later, and now it seems that everyone just says COVID. Fun fact: I never caught COVID once in NYC, despite the fact that I was commuting to Brooklyn from Manhattan (using subways, buses, Ubers) every day and working crazy hours. As soon as the vaccine was available, I got it. I did catch it once, though: after attending a football match at the Paris Olympics. But it was like a very mild but annoying cold for about 2-3 days, and then I was fine. (I tend to never get sick, knock on wood--I attribute this to my powerful Lithuanian immunity. 🤣)

@Xword Junkie No apology necessary! I can easily laugh at my own countries for many reasons (the USA and Lithuania), and I'm pretty easygoing in general; I don't even know why I reacted the way I did. (The late hour? The latest US news? I have no idea.) Thank you for your graciousness.

@Francis Don't be so hard on yourself. Just keep reading poetry and thinking about it. It can be extraordinarily moving, revelatory, and gorgeous once given a chance. As Eliot said, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." (My English prof quoted this in a class on the plays of Samuel Beckett, and it really shifted my worldview about art in a positive way.)

@David Connell My first impulse was "laity," but then I soon discovered that the "y" didn't work...

@Nancy Me too! I have a pretty serious memory, and I was suprised to see "Phileas." However, it seems that we're not the only ones... I found this discussion: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Retconned/comments/wd9169/people_in_1947_discussing_phineas_fogg_change_to" target="_blank">https://www.reddit.com/r/Retconned/comments/wd9169/people_in_1947_discussing_phineas_fogg_change_to</a>/

@Isabeau Thank you for the explanation! @Xword Junkie Apologies! Ever since I was a child (many eons ago), Lithuania has often been used as the butt of a joke. I now think your quip was clever and cute. 😊

@Eric Hougland Please see my response to Isabeau above. Thank you, too, for the explanation! 😊

@Andrzej The slang for a canine head tilt used to be "baroo," but I don't think it's much in use anymore (?). I love it, though. This is a famous video of three adorable pugs barooing: <a href="https://youtu.be/9uuqXXT7VYo?si=yQvtNWiJqclMfwlq" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/9uuqXXT7VYo?si=yQvtNWiJqclMfwlq</a>

@Mean Old Lady I googled it, and it appears to mean Providence, RI--which would make sense since G also mentions the "South Coast (MA-RI border)".

@Ιασων I've been doing the NYT crosswords for almost five decades, and in the Maleska Era, I remember ORT being constantly used (clue: leftovers). As someone rather well-read (and with a lint-trap memory), I never once heard or saw that particular word in use ever--except in the NYT crosswords. Does anyone else remember this particular word?

@Steve L I had the same exact thought.

@Jacqui J The brilliant troops who started setting up shop outside pot dispensaries cracked me up--how perfect for both the buyers and sellers!

@Josh I'm not British, but I've heard that term before. There's a disturbing scene in the movie "9½ Weeks" (1986) where the Mickey Rourke character grills the Kim Basinger character about whether or not she has been a "nosy parker." It wasn't a common expression in my life, but I'd hear/see it on occasion. I don't have a particular movie to cite, but one would hear "amscray" in old films featuring the Dead End Kids (late 1930s), The Bowery Boys (1940s), and the like (if I remember correctly). We kids of the late 60s/early 70s learned Pig Latin from a popular kids' book (can't remember which one). In a similar vein, the PBS children's show "Zoom" created a language called Ubbi Dubbi, in which the sound "ub" came before every vowel sound of a word ("Hubi frubends" = "Hi friends").

@Graphic I always liked "Make like a preacher and get the hell out of here."

@Francis I'm Lithuanian/American, and Joninės (Feast of Saint John/Midsummer) is my favorite holiday there. Fun sort-of-related fact: in Lithuanian, the word for ladybug/ladybird is "Dievo karvytė," which means God's little cow.

@Bill You forget the Montparnasse Cemetery (which is but a few minutes' walk from my apartment). Buried there are a lot of luminaries: Simon Beckett (one of my most favorite writers) Charles Baudelaire Guy de Maupassant Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir Susan Sontag Marguerite Duras Serge Gainsbourg Jane Birkin Jean Seberg Eugene Ionesco Man Ray Agnes Varda ...and many other notable people.

@LBG LOL re the mention of Bobby Sherman!

@Paul I agree with you 100%. (Ubbi dubbi brings back good memories of my childhood! 😊)

@SP I had the same thought (as a 61-year-old): I wondered whether "reruns" were even a thing nowadays (I'm referring to what that word meant in the 70s and 80s). I have the same memories as you with respect to knowing when shows were on etc. I also remember when everyone would watch the same shows and then discuss the latest episode at school or work the next day...

@Banjo Nelson Any major dude will tell you that sometimes a grid just doesn't lend itself to a special configuration.

@Steve L They say that size doesn't matter.

@Steve L Thanks for the history on this! I was wondering why I never saw it anymore. (Not that I missed it!)