Dates in AM Eng

And today, March 14, is Pi Day, something that only works in American English.

Pi Day was the theme of today's NYTimes crossword. It took me a bit of thinking to figure it out-- mention of a celebration in mid-March made me think of St Patrick's Day, but it didn't fit the number of squares.

Oh, no! How do you say "spoiler alert" in French? I read bjd's post before doing the crossword puzzle!

Well, I'm back to say it didn't matter. I was afraid that PIDAY or maybe PI as a prefix would appear throughout the puzzle, but it only showed up once. And it helped me to solve a clue for a word that intersected it, so I actually have bjd to thank for my being able to complete that corner of the puzzle. Thanks! Merci! ¡Gracias!

Edited by NorthAmerican.

Ooops, sorry, NorthAmerican. I posted quite late in my day and didn't think about any crossword puzzle solvers.

Apology accepted, bjd. And as I said above, you actually helped me, because I had SYC going down, and it was the P of PIDAY that led me to realize the answer ended in UP.

OK, I can't really expect people to take this into account, but the Baltimore Sun runs teh Times Crossword abt two weeks late. So you've both either spoiled it for me or helped me out.

Sorry, VinnyD. I will try never to mention crossword clues or solutions again.

Just wait a few years, though, and you won't remember things like crossword solutions two weeks after being told them.

In fact I'll probably member this threeqd only after I fill in PIDAY.

It's a longer gap than I thought. Today's puzzle was the one for Valentine's Day. Most likely I will have forgotten this thread completely.

You know, getting back to date & spelling reform--I was thinking about Turkey. One scholar has called Turkish language reform A Catastrophic Success.

>I gave my book about it the subtitle "A Catastrophic Success". Though the reform has not been so drastic in its effect on the spoken language, it has made everything written before the early 1930s, and much that has been written since, increasingly obscure to each new generation. It has undeniably been a success, in that the reformers succeeded in their purpose of ethnic cleansing; getting rid of the non-Turkish elements in their language, so that it has changed as much in the last century as in the preceding seven hundred. I hope to show you why I call that success catastrophic.

[snip]

Let me sum up my four reasons for calling the reform catastrophic. (1) The reformers did not close the language gap between intellectuals and non-intellectuals - what they did was to create a new gap. (2) They impoverished the language by failing to produce Turkish replacements for all the Arabic and Persian words they consigned to oblivion. This loss affects every Turk who now, in speaking or writing, looks for the word that expresses his feelings but does not find it, because it is as dead as Etruscan and has not been replaced. (3) Many of the replacements that were produced are far from being pure Turkish. (4) Most Turks below the age of 50 are cut off from the writings of the 1920s and 1930s, one of the greatest periods of their modern literature. The "Translations into Modern Turkish" that you will see in bookshops are no substitute for the real thing.

One other thing that Atatürk decreed was a switch from the Islamic to the Western calendar. So you can see some rather disconcerting things, such as a tombstone with a date of birth in the 1300s and a date of death in the 1900s. If all you know is that so-andso was born in 1400, you have to figure out if the person was there during the Crusades or during World War I.