New York Times, Tuesday, January 1, 2019

I'm a big fan of "what connects these disparate things?" themes. It's a lot of fun to get to the end of an early-week puzzle and still have no idea what's going on. PASSABLE gave me a good a-ha click — PASS the HAT, PASS the TORCH, PASS the TIME, PASS the BUCK.

I also like Gary's consistency. You could use other passable things, like PASS MUSTER or PASS A NOTE, but sticking strictly to a PASS THE ___ pattern adds some tightness.

It's unusual to have mid-length slots (6-7 letters) add much to the quality of a solve, but there were a lot of strong ones today: PRONTO, PISCES, AGHAST, HOBBIT, EVOLVE, STOOGE. Outstanding stuff.

Speaking of AGHAST, though, let's address the issue that overrode the solving experience for me.

Will and I had a dialogue over BEANER; an offensive term slung at people from Mexico. I wondered if it might be a West Coast / East Coast thing, so I alerted Will about this. He thought about it but decided that since there is a valid dictionary definition, people would have to just ignore the secondary meaning.

I generally think Will does a great job in editing the NYT puzzle — hard to argue with results, with solvership exploding into the hundreds of thousands under his helm. This is one of the less than 5% of things that I strongly disagree with, though. Yes, BEANER is in the dictionary as a baseball term. But a pitch at someone's head is usually called a "bean ball," not a BEANER.

And I Googled BEANER to see what came up first — a page full of definitions as the racist term.

I respect Will's viewpoint that people will see what they want to see in any entry. For example, I personally take offense to CHINK in puzzles, and a couple of readers have bluntly told me "I'm being too sensitive" (and worse). My response is that it's easy to say that if you haven't been told to "go home, you dirty f*cking chink" (and much worse). But I do understand this one, since a CHINK in one's armor is a very common saying. So I shrug it off.

BEANER on the other hand, feels so, so, so very wrong, considering that the alternate definition isn't much in real usage these days.

Puzzles ought to be enjoyable, a smile-inducing diversion from the daily struggles of life. Even if BEANER punches just a small number of solvers, that makes it worth changing — especially since the fix is super easy. ABEL to AHEM and ANI to ALI is just one of the many ways to revise.

An ugly blot on an otherwise pleasant puzzle.

ADDED NOTE: A spokesperson from the NYT issued this statement: "Tuesday's Crossword puzzle included an entry that was offensive and hurtful. It is simply not acceptable in The New York Times Crossword and we apologize for including it."

(copied from Wordplay)

I'm very sorry for the distraction about BEANER (2D) in today's fine puzzle by Gary Cee.

Neither Joel [Fagliano] nor I had ever heard the slur before — and I don't know anyone who would use it. Maybe we live in rarefied circles.

In researching this puzzle, we discovered the other meaning of the word as a slur. Later, Jeff Chen over at XWord Info brought it to our attention as well.

My feeling, rightly or wrongly, is that any benign meaning of a word is fair game for a crossword. This is an issue that comes up occasionally with entries like GO O.K. (which we clued last April as "Proceed all right," but which as a solid word is a slur), CHINK (benign in the sense as a chink in one's armor), etc. These are legitimate words.

Perhaps I need to rethink this opinion if enough solvers are bothered. I want your focus to be on the puzzle rather than being distracted by side issues. But I assure you this viewpoint is expressed with a pure heart.

Meanwhile, for any solver who was offended by 2-Down in today's puzzle, I apologize.