Yesterday's puzzle:GROAK is a five-letter verb from old Scots dialect, written down in the early 1800s and dug back up lately by fans of forgotten words. Every dog owner has seen it done. What does it mean? A. To brew beer in a hollowed-out log · B. To stare silently at someone who's eating, hoping they'll share · C. To snore loudly in a church pew · D. To cheat at cards by marking the deck
Answer: GROAK is B: to stare silently at someone who's eating, hoping they'll share.
Word of the day
gerrymander
(JERR-ee-man-der)
Means: To draw voting district lines in weird shapes so your side wins more seats.
Etymology: In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed off on a state senate map with one district so twisted that a Boston Gazette cartoon drew it as a winged monster and called it "The Gerry-mander," half Gerry, half salamander. The catch: Gerry said his name with a hard G, like "Gary," so the word started out as "Gary-mander." Everybody says it with a J now, and Gerry went on to be vice president anyway.
"The way he splits the bar tab, with all the cheap beers on his side, is a straight-up gerrymander."
Design of the day
Postmodernism
By the late 1970s, some architects were sick of plain glass boxes, so they brought back columns, arches, and bright colors, used half as a joke. That's postmodernism: borrowed history, cartoon proportions, and a wink. Michael Graves built the loud Portland Building in Oregon in 1982, and in 1985 he designed a kettle for the Italian company Alessi with a little red plastic bird on the spout that sings when the water boils. Graves later designed more than a thousand cheap household goods for Target, which is how postmodernism ended up in your kitchen drawer.
Zamboni is a brand name, not the name of the machine. The generic term is ice resurfacer. Frank Zamboni ran the Iceland skating rink in Paramount, California, where smoothing the ice took four or five guys scraping, squeegeeing, and spraying for about an hour and a half. He spent years tinkering in the shop, and in 1949 his Model A did the whole job by itself in about 15 minutes. Skating star Sonja Henie bought one to take on tour, and the name stuck to every machine after it.
