Veevee

@Sophie B. Thou is in the subject case, as is "thou lovest", or "thou shalt not". Thee is in the object case, as in "God loveth thee" (since we're talking about biblical English). Kind of like he and him, she and her, and I and me refer to the same person, but one is subject case, and one is object case. In modern English, previously distinct forms of subject and object coalesced into you, which is used for both.

@Joseph Shain Hercules is the Latinized form of the Greek name Heracles, so it's the same thing really. Greek mythology entered Western culture via the Romans, so the Latin names are more familiar to us, including derived forms such as herculean, after the 12 (?) near-impossible tasks given to this guy...

@MExpat When I was a teenager, I worked as a paper girl for a while (or whatever it's called in English), and I was assigned to a particular paper route.

@George Accra and Eire appear in so many crosswords it makes sense to learn them. I'm relatively new to NYT crosswords (about 3 years), but it seems Accra is the solution to almost every African city, no matter how it's clued. I didn't think of Leonard Cohen right away because in my mind, a singer/songwriter is not the same as a powt (and the Nobel committee clearly disagrees with me, and actually, looking at some of tge sublime lyrics of his songs, so do I.) The only one I didn't know was HMart, but that was gettable with the crosses. ACkE isn't a words, as far as I know... I had issues with another name, because I recently re-listened to Parsifal, where Kundry is an important character.So I desperately tried to make that fit for one of the K sisters about whom I only know that they exist and are all spelled with a K, and that's more than I care to know...

@sonnel To me as a German, "Ich bin ein Berliner" sounds ok. Not correct if I were grading a student's essay, but perfectly acceptable in spoken German. In Berlin, that kind of donut isn't called Berliner but Pfannkuchen ("pancake"). I bet that if the rest of Germany had called them that too, nobody would have remarked on the grammar error at all but lauded JFK for trying to speak German and even getting the pronunciation kinda right. My guess is, a certain other holder of the same high office might have pronounced the first word "itch".

@John It's been a while since I took Diachronic Linguistics 101, but I learned that cognates are words that have developed from the same word, even if today their meaning is not the same any more. Both "actual" and Italian "attuale" are derived from the same Latin word, "actualis". Only the English word has changed its meaning over time - Italian, German and French have all kept the original meaning. Another example I remember from that class was the English word "write" is cognate to the German word "ritzen" even though the latter means "etch" or "scratch" today. But in the very olden days, words used to be etched in stone or wood, both on the British Isles and on the Continent. Brits kept the word when the medium for writing changed, while Germans adopted (and eventually adapted into their pronunciation system) the Latin word scribere (German schreiben) once the medium switched to parchment. The influence of monasteries and Latin texts written there probably played a role in this. So "schreiben" is a loan word, not a cognate.

@Jack G H I'm a German living in Switzerland, and I've only ever heard it on some politics podcasts. This is the first time I saw it in writing, and I needed all the crosses to get it.

@Andrzej Odessa TX is one of the cities where I have friends since I visited it on my American travels many lifetimes ago (i.e. the 1990s). So as soon as I had a couple of crosses it was a gimme. As for the spelling of the original Ukrainian Odes(s)a, the version with ss seems to ensure that it gets closer to the original pronunciation. Otherwise it might be pronounced "Odeeza" in English. Since Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet there's always the dilemma * Do you use a traditional transliteration, even if it is no longer considered politically correct or opportune? (E.g. Kiev) * Do you follow an official transliteration system even if it does not result in something that can easily be pronounced correctly? (e.g. Zelenskyy) * Do you use a spelling that leads a reader of the target language to get the pronunciation sort of right without having to overthink? (E.g. Selenski, the German transliteration of Mr. Zelenskyy). It's especially tricky when a traditional transliteration could lead to the assumption that ownership is disputed or illegally claimed. German-language media still use the traditional Russian-sounding Kiew (yep, with a W here), but have easily adopted Luhansk (over Russian Lugansk), Dnipro (over Dnjepropetrowsk) or Lwiw (over Lwow), even though the latter are all still in everybody's old high school atlas. Probably because it's much harder to change a name everybody knows than one nobody has ever heard.

@Bill in Yokohama English is always shorter than German. 20% shrinkage when translationg i to English is normal. (living in a quadrilingual country, I often have to translate into English, which many consider the fifth, inofficial national language of Switzerland. The English version is always shorter than any of the others, and German is always the longest.) Our sentence structure is often more convoluted and words are longer. There are a couple or so audiobooks I have in both languages, and the German ones are about 15% longer. Seems you found one that's read by a very slow reader! I would turn up the speed, as slow readers tend to drive me bonkers.