Which figures from the tech world are cool enough to make an appearance in the New York Times crossword?
The New York Times' crossword dedicated to Steve Jobs on October 7th 2011, two days after his death.
I really liked this Quartz retrospective of AOL as a clue in The Times crossword yesterday, charting its course from "Prodigy competitor" in 1997, to "Huffington Post buyer" in 2012. Crossword clues are interesting (perhaps only slightly, I'll concede) in that they need to be at once a challenge to decipher and clued in a way that's solvable. "Prodigy competitor" as a clue for AOL wouldn't work in 2012, because Prodigy doesn't exist anymore. As such, The Times crossword acts as an interesting barometer of when something becomes common-enough knowledge to be used in a crossword.
Rex Parker's crossword blog provided a behind-the-scenes view of this recently in dissecting a crossword he set for The Times (under the name Michael Sharp; almost all setters work under an assumed name) with Caleb Madison. Of his clue for Ai Weiwei, Will Shortz, the Times crossword editor, wrote "I'm not crazy about the entry AI WEIWEI. He's not so well-known yet, and his name is crazily spelled and not inferable." Despite a good amount of recent coverage on him in The Times. And AOL, despite being founded in 1991, didn't make it into a Times crossword until 1997. So the Quartz piece got me wondering about other clues in The Times.
Apple was founded in 1976, but didn't make it into a Times crossword until 1995 as an "I.B.M. rival", and then frequently as a "Mac maker" and occasionally as "Beatles record label". It was clued rather cleverly in 2001 as "Jobs site", and again in 2007 as "Jobs creation". Its first appearance as "iPhone maker" was in November 2007, almost a year after it was introduced at the Macworld conference. MICROSOFT on the other hand has yet to make its debut in the crossword, but that's not surprising given its length and dearth of vowels. GOOGLE has four appearances since 2005, seven years after it was founded. FACEBOOK popped up once in 2008, four years after it was founded, as a Friendster alternative. TWITTER has made two appearances ("service with many followers") since 2010, three years after The Times joined Twitter. INSTAGRAM got in there for the first time last month. GROUPON made it just once in September 2011. No love for TUMBLR, PANDORA (except as a box), RDIO, SPOTIFY, or PINTEREST, though.
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