The JimH Blog

Ecdysiast's accouterment redux

The JimH Blog owes a lot to beautiful women who are willing to take off their clothes. (If you got here from Google and you’re in a hurry, the answer is TASSEL. Otherwise, read on.)

There are many ways people stumble into this blog, but for the past couple of weeks and especially in the past few days, most visitors have arrived from MSN Search, Yahoo, or Google looking for information about naked women. That's not so surprising on the web, but in this case most of the visitors didn’t know that naked women were what they were interested in.

The secret to getting lots of search hits is show up in the top ten or so results for a phrase many people want to investigate. If the phrase is too common, insignificant blogs like this don’t stand a chance. If the phrase is too obscure, nobody will type it in. Lately lots of people have been typing in "ecdysiast’s accouterment" because it turned up in a New York Times crossword puzzle, I liked the clue, and I blogged about it. Click here to see the original post including the meaning of the phrase.

I got many hits the first few days as puzzlers struggled with this bizarre clue. Then recently I've been getting around 1000 more search hits a day. The NYT syndicates the puzzles, but if you get them somewhere other than The Grey Lady, they arrive a week later. So thank you, Puzzle Master Will Shortz for drawing so many people to my humble blog. I’m sure they’ll all become loyal fans.

To the puzzlers of the world who found themselves here, I have something important to say: there is no shame in using the web to help solve crosswords. After all, you know Will and the gang use the web to come up with those perverse clues.

Finally, if you read the comments of the original post, you’ll notice that
Larry Osterman knew what an ecdysiast was without having to look it up. He claims it was because of his love of musical theatre. Uh huh.

How do you get down off an elephant?

You don't. You get down off a duck. Here's a similar joke, quoting Groucho this time: It's nice out. They should leave it out.

The duck down gag was my favorite joke when I was in elementary school and it still represents a kind of humor I love. Parsing sentences in your brain requires remarkable mental agility. During the course of the sentence, you maintain a list of words and concepts and when the sentence ends, you rearrange them into subjects, predicates, and objects until they make sense.

Your brain takes some shortcuts to try to make the parsing easier. When it finds phrases with "strong binding" it collapses them into single concepts. Oddly enough, "down off an elephant" has strong binding. I say oddly because it’s not a phrase you use a lot in everyday speech. (I'm making an assumption about you here.) Nevertheless, your brain collapses the phrase into a single image of someone dismounting a large mammal.

This kind of humor, then, counts on your brain binding the phrase, realizing the error, expanding the nicely packaged concept back into individual words, and then reparsing the sentence with the new information. For some reason, this is an enjoyable process for the brain to do. We have a name for this. It's called "funny".

Ecdysiast's accouterment

I have a confession to make. I suffer from a terrible addiction. I do the NYT crossword puzzle every day. It seems benign, but it’s a sick, twisted obsession.

The associated high is a good one, though. In the best puzzles, you read all the clues before you get a single answer. Then some synaptic connection clicks deep in your cranium, you make a first guess, and that leads to another and another and another. It’s very satisfying in the same way that a great play or novel lets you uncover underlying truths before the characters involved do.

Some of the clues are poetry themselves. A recent four-letter answer was clued "Land of Opportunity". It ends with an S. It starts with a M. Ok, the answer is MARS. Did you notice the last word of the clue was capitalized? Dastardly clever. Will Shortz claims his favorite clue is "It turns into another story." The fifteen-letter answer is SPIRAL STAIRCASE.

One of the other joys of crosswords is, of course, that you learn new words. The clue for 7 Across in today’s puzzle is "Ecdysiast’s accouterment" (six letters). Huh? What would an ecdysiast wear anyway? I’ll put the answer in a comment to this post in case you’re still working on the puzzle, but just say that out loud -- Ecdysiast’s accouterment. What a great clue.