Tag: Batter’s boxful crossword clue

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Constructed by: Erik Agard

Edited by: Patti Varol

Today’s Theme: None

Read on, or jump to …
… a complete list of answers

Bill’s time: 13m 59s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

12A Not giving anything away : MUM

The phrase “mum’s the word” has been around since the early 1700s. “Mum” has been used to mean “silent” for centuries, the idea being that “mum” is the sound made when the lips are tightly sealed.

15A Rather blue : RACY

Blue laws are prohibitive statutes designed to restrict activities on a Sunday for religious reasons. There seem to be a few dubious etymologies published to explain the use of the term “blue” in such a context. The most credible derivation seems to point at the supporters of Oliver Cromwell in the British Parliament of the mid-17th century, who were referred to as “blue-stockings”.

17A One-on-one play in a five-on-five b-ball game : ISO

In basketball, “iso” is shorthand for “isolation play”. It’s a strategy where the team has all but one of its offensive players move to one side of the court. This “isolates” their best scorer on the other side with just one defender. The goal is to let the star player use their individual skills to beat their defender and score without interference from other members of the defense.

20A Actor Beatty : NED

Actor Ned Beatty is possibly best remembered for the rather disturbing “squeal like a pig” scene in the movie “Deliverance”. Beatty also earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1976 movie “Network”.

23A April option : E-FILE

April 15th wasn’t always Tax Day in the US. The deadline for returns was March 1st from 1913-18, when it was moved to March 15th. Tax Day has been April 15th since 1955.

25A Mile High horses? : BRONCOS

Mile High Stadium was built for baseball in 1948, and was known originally as Bears Stadium after the minor league team called the Denver Bears. The stadium was also used for football in the fifties, when it became home to the Denver Broncos. The Broncos grew as a team in the Mile High Stadium, and played their last game there in December 2000, before moving to the nearby INVESCO Field at Mile High. The original stadium was demolished in 2002.

27A Jerk components : SPICES

Jerky is meat that has been trimmed of fat and dried. The term “jerky” comes into English via Spanish from the Incan Quechua “ch’arki” meaning “dried flesh”.

34A Targets of biannual battery replacements : SMOKE ALARMS

Don’t forget to change the batteries in your smoke detectors on a regular basis. A public information campaign in Australia recommends doing so on April Fools’ Day every year. Not a bad idea …

35A Flash the Dolphin or Splash the Whale : BEANIE BABY

There were originally just nine Beanie Babies when Ty Warner introduced the stuffed animal in 1993. In the late nineties the toy became a real fad, largely due to innovative marketing techniques. For example, there was no mass marketing with constant TV ads, and the production volume was limited pushing the line into the realm of collectibles. Beanie Baby models were also “retired” on a regular basis, fueling a “must have” behavior in the market.

36A High-flying Iñupiat tradition : BLANKET TOSS

The Iñupiat are an Indigenous Alaskan people whose name translates literally to “real people”. Sometimes known as the Alaskan Inuit, their native tongue is recognized as an official language of Alaska. The Iñupiat are a hunter-gatherer community, and partly rely on the millennium-old tradition of subsistence whale hunting.

41A Jab in a one-two combo? : BOOSTER SHOT

An injection using a hypodermic needle might be termed a “shot” in North America, and a “jab” in Britain and Ireland.

42A Bona __ : FIDE

“Bona fide(s)” translates from the Latin as “in good faith”, and is used to indicate honest intentions. It can also mean that something is authentic, like a piece of art that is represented in good faith as being genuine.

46A “A Master of __”: P. Djèlí Clark novel inspired by Islamic mythology : DJINN

Dexter Gabriel is a historian, as well as a writer of speculative fiction. While publishing his academic work under his real name, he uses several pen names for his literary works, all variants of “Phenderson Djèlí Clark”. “Phenderson” was his grandfather’s name, and “Clark” was his mother’s maiden name. The term “djèlí” (also “griot”) describes a traditional West African storyteller and oral historian.

51A Scooby-__ : DOO

“Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” is a series of cartoons produced for Hanna-Barbera Productions, first broadcast in 1969. The title character is a great Dane dog befriended by a young male called Shaggy Rogers. The character’s name was inspired by the famous “doo-be-doo-be-doo” refrain in the Frank Sinatra hit “Strangers in the Night”. Shaggy was voiced by famed disk jockey Casey Kasem. Shaggy and Scooby’s friends are Velma, Fred and Daphne.

56A Box on a table : ELEMENT

Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist. When Mendeleev classified elements according to their chemical properties, he noticed patterns and was able to group elements into his famous 1869 Periodic Table. So powerful was his table that he actually predicted the properties of some elements that had not even been discovered in 1869. Element number 101 is mendelevium, and was named after Mendeleev.

57A Mahjong piece : TILE

Mahjong (also “mahjongg” and “mah-jongg”) is the Chinese word for “sparrow”. Mahjong is a game that originated in China, and is usually played by four players. There is a myth that the game was developed by the Chinese philosopher, Confucius. The myth also suggests that Confucius was fond of birds, and hence chose the name “sparrow”.

59A Starting point : SCRATCH

Apparently the phrase “start from scratch” arose in the world of sports, probably in cricket or boxing. A line would be scratched into the ground to indicate a starting point.

60A Translucent chalcedony : ONYX

Onyx is a form of quartz that comes in many different shades, but most often it’s the black version that’s used for jewelry. The name “onyx” comes from the Greek word for “fingernail”, as onyx in the flesh color is said to resemble a fingernail.

Chalcedony is a mineral. It is a form of silica. The name “chalcedony” might come from the ancient town of Chalcedon, which is now a suburb of Istanbul known as Kadıköy. Although the connection seems obvious, there are doubts …

Down

1D Source of leverage : CROWBAR

A crowbar is a wonderful tool, one that can be used to pry open things, and to remove nails. The claw at one or both ends of the tool aids in that nail removal, and it is likely this iron claw was said to resemble the claw of a crow, giving us the name “crowbar”. Back in Elizabethan times, the same tool was called an “iron crow”. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” that reads “Get me an iron crow and bring it straight/Unto my cell.”

2D Actress Cox : LAVERNE

Actress Laverne Cox’s big break came with the role Sophia Burset on the hit show “Orange is the New Black”. The Burset character is a trans woman and, in flashbacks on the show, the pre-transition Burset is portrayed by Laverne’s identical twin brother Reginald, known by the stage name M Lamar. In 2018, Laverne became the first openly transgender woman to make the cover of a “Cosmopolitan” magazine, and is also the first openly transgender woman to have a wax figure representation of herself in Madame Tussauds.

3D Animals with spots : OCELOTS

The ocelot is a wild cat found mainly in South and Central America, although there have been sightings as far north as Arkansas. An ocelot doesn’t look too different from a domestic cat, and some have been kept as pets. Perhaps most famously, Salvador Dali had one that he carried around everywhere with him.

4D Erykah Badu’s signature song : TYRONE

“Tyrone” is a song recorded by Erykah Badu in 1997. It was destined to become her signature song, even though it didn’t make it into the “Billboard” charts, never having been released commercially in the US.

6D Insect in the family Formicidae : ANT

The study of ants is known as myrmecology. The term “myrmecology” derives from the Greek “myrmex” meaning “ant”.

7D Calc prerequisite : TRIG

Trigonometry (trig) is a branch of mathematics dealing with triangles, and calculations based on the relationship between a triangle’s angles and the lengths of its sides.

19D Letters above a tilde : ESC

The escape key (Esc) was originally used just to control computer peripherals. It was a key that allowed the computer operator to stop what the peripheral was doing (cancel a print job, for example). Nowadays the escape key is used for all sorts of things, especially in gaming programs.

30D Interludes on some hip-hop albums : SKITS

A skit is a brief, non-musical comedy scene included in many hip-hop albums. Skits are used to build an album’s narrative between songs. They became a fundamental hip-hop element in 1989 with the release of De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising”, in which producer Prince Paul introduced them for the first time.

34D “No.,” and others : SENTENCES

“No.” holds the distinction of being one of the shortest complete sentences in the English language, alongside its more active counterpart, “Go!”

35D Nevada’s Great __ National Park : BASIN

The Great Basin is a large region of the US covering most of Nevada, much of Utah and some parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon and California. The 200,000 square mile area drains internally, with all precipitation sinking underground or flowing into lakes. Most of the lakes in the Great Basin are saline, including the Great Salt Lake, Pyramid Lake and the Humboldt Sink.

36D Cannes opener : BONJOUR

Cannes is a city on the French Riviera that is noted as host of the Cannes Film Festival. The decision to host an annual film festival was adopted by the city just before WWII. However, the festival had to wait for the end of the war for its launch in 1946.

37D Ash removers : LOTIONS

Lotions can be used to remove “ashiness,” the colloquial term for the grayish, flaky texture that occurs when the skin’s outermost layer becomes severely dehydrated. Ashiness is a visual phenomenon, known medically as xerosis.

41D “Why ask why?” beer : BUD DRY

Anheuser-Busch introduced Bud Dry beer in 1989, and “unintroduced” it in 2010 🙂.

45D “Lust, Caution” director Lee : ANG

The 2007 film “Lust, Caution” is based on a 1979 novella of the same name by Chinese and American writer Eileen Chang. Both novella and film are allegedly based on a true story about Zheng Pingru, a socialite who spied on the Japanese Army in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).

48D 1815 novel set in Highbury : EMMA

Jane Austen’s novel “Emma” (1815) is her last novel published during her lifetime. Unlike many of her other heroines, Emma Woodhouse is a wealthy, privileged young woman who is not concerned with finding a husband but rather delights in matchmaking for others, often with disastrous and comedic results. A favorite of mine …

53D Business letters : LLC

A limited liability company (LLC) has a structure that limits the liability of the owner or owners. It is a hybrid structure in the sense that it can be taxed as would an individual or partnership, while also maintaining the liability protection afforded to a corporation.

54D Business letters : INC

A company that has incorporated uses the abbreviation “Inc.” after its name. By incorporating, a company forms a corporation, which is a legal entity that has legal rights similar to those of an individual. For example, a corporation can sue another corporation or individual. However, a corporation does not have all the rights of citizens. A corporation does not have the Fifth Amendment right of protections against self-incrimination, for example. It is perhaps understandable that the concept of “corporations as persons” is a frequent subject for debate.