I spent this past weekend in the whirlwind that was the 2010 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Since I was working as an official, most of my time was logged behind closed doors, working with scanners and tapping away on a tiny netbook.
On Saturday evening, however, the brilliant automated scoring tools created by puzzle constructor and tournament official Matt Ginsberg allowed us to catch up enough in the scoring to step out and join in the fun and non-crossword games. In one music trivia quiz, I discovered, much to my chagrin, why I can’t seem to pile any more info into my old dog of a brain: space there has already been squatted by the lyrics to Jefferson Starship’s “Sara” and Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”
For “Listmania,” we split into 4-person teams and were given 15 minutes to complete as many answers on a set series of lists as possible. We were asked, among other things, to list all the Secretaries General of the U.N., all the instruments in an orchestra, all the countries in South America, all the letter names in the International Alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, etc.), all the Harry Potter books, all the taxonomic ranks in biology, all the novels of Charles Dickens, all the musicals with music/lyrics/book by Stephen Sondheim, all the nations that have hosted the Olympics, all the U.S. Cabinet departments, all the ways to eat Green Eggs and Ham. And more.
I found myself on a Dream Team — as in, I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I was awake and not conjuring up the whole thing in some big R.E.M. jam session. Let’s just say two of them have appeared on “The Simpsons” and one of them works for the C.I.A. (the tasty, hands-on, non-Langley version). And they’ve all created crosswords that have made grown people weep.
My main contribution to the mix was remembering every item listed in the song “My Favorite Things,” from The Sound of Music (Doorbells! Sleigh bells! Schnitzel with noodles!), and being able to name exactly 1/3 of the companies comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Far more interesting than the items we got right, however, were the holes in our knowledge and the points where we simply brain-cramped.
- When naming this year’s Best Picture nominees for the Academy Awards, we went 9 for 10, but forgot The Blind Side.
“Ugh, I think I just blocked Sandra Bullock out of my mind entirely after All About Steve,” muttered the squad’s movie maven.
- We really, really remember Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Just not at the time.
- We left out 3M from the DJIA. Gah. Please let me back into the state next time I return to Minnesota. Pretty please?
- We also left out McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. Which I’ll totally blame on the influence of the C.I.A.
- I will also finger David Copperfield for the disappearance of Little Dorrit.
- Bolivia? No marching powder for us, sorry. Coke Stop Fail #2.
- Anyone Can Whistle, but Do I Hear a Waltz?
- No Romeo. No Juliet. No Commerce. No Transportation. Clearly, we all need a CB Radio refresher. Coke Stop Fail #3.
To give you some idea of the blistering amount of brainpower in the room, even while we were packed with ringers, we didn’t make the cut for the top four squads. They were invited onstage for the live finals, where each player was asked in single-elimination turn to name something off even more difficult lists, including:
- Buyable spaces on a Monopoly board containing state names
- Winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture with one-word titles
(to which one contestant, drawing a blank, said “Showgirls!”)
- Books of the Bible that end in the letter “S”
(same contestant, same situation, same answer –
at last, good justification for a “Showgirls” sequel)
- U.S. Presidents whose names begin with dictionary words of 4 letters or more
- U.S. states whose two-letter postal abbreviations are playable words in Scrabble
The final answer to the final question in the final round was “Utah.” Which means you are probably asking yourself, “Ut?“ What is an ut?”
The Merriam-Webster’s Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary, 4th Edition defines “ut” as “the musical tone C in the French solmization system now replaced by do.”
All those note names you remember from “Doe a deer, a female deer” came from somewhere long before Oscar Hammerstein remixed them. The most common explanation is that they come from the 8th-century Hymn to St. John by Paulus Diaconus, whose Latin lyrics are:
Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.
(So that these your servants can, with all their voice, sing your wonderful feats, clean the blemish of our spotted lips, O Saint John.)
Hence, “ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.” The seventh note in the scale was not included in the progression of the original hymn, but when it was added into the solfege scale around the 17th century, the same hymn came into play. In many European countries, the note we Americans sing as “ti” goes by “si,” derived from the Latin initials of Saint John.
Since the syllable “ut” is trickier to sing aloud than all the rest, it was replaced along the way with something that rolls a bit more easily off the tongue, which many attribute to the first syllable in the word “Dominus,” or Latin for “Lord.”
…That will bring us back to “do”!
Now, where’s my cream-colored pony?