Tag: Stick it to your rival crossword clue

Bill’s time: 10m 01s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

9A Pre-K building blocks : ABCS

Pre-kindergarten (pre-K)

“Kindergarten” is a German word, one translated as “children’s garden”. The term was coined by the German education authority Friedrich Fröbel in 1840, when he used it as the name for his play and activity institute that he created for young children to use before they headed off to school. His thought was that children should be nourished educationally, like plants in a garden.

13A Plant that thrives in a terra-cotta pot : ALOE

The term “terra cotta” comes to us from Latin via Italian and means “baked earth”. Terra-cotta is a ceramic made from clay which is left unglazed. Maybe the most famous work in terra-cotta is the Terracotta Army, the enormous collection of life-size figures that was buried with Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China around 210 BC. I had the privilege of seeing some of this collection when it toured the US a few years ago, and even the few pieces on display were very impressive.

16A Twill-woven worsted wool garment : KILT

The Scottish skirt called a “kilt” takes its name from the Middle English word “kilten” meaning “to tuck up”. The idea is that the kilt can be tucked up around the body to give freedom to the legs.

The verb “to twill” means to weave a cloth (called “twill”) that has a pattern of diagonal parallel ribs.

Worsted is a high-quality, smooth yarn made from relatively long wool fibers. The name “worsted” comes from the traditional manufacturing center for the yarn in England, i.e. the village of Worstead in the county of Norfolk.

17A Fix, in a way : SPAY

Our verb “to spay”, meaning “to surgically remove the ovaries of” (an animal), comes from an old Anglo-French word “espeier” meaning “to cut with a sword”.

18A Purple bubble tea flavor : TARO

Bubble tea, sometimes called “boba tea”, is a tea-based drink from Taiwan. The “bubbles” are chewy tapioca balls that are usually added to the drink.

19A Annual e-sport fighting competition, in brief : EVO

The Evolution Championship Series (Evo) is an esports event held annually since 1996, when it was known as “Battle by the Bay”. That first competition was held in Sunnyvale, California, hence the name. The name changed to “Evo” in 2002, and the venue changed to various locations in the Las Vegas Valley starting in 2005. The focus of the tournament is the fighting game genre of video games.

21A Chocolatier with the tagline “Life is a ball” : LINDT

The delicious Swiss chocolate sold under the Lindt brand name has its origins in a small confectionery store in Zurich in the 1840s. Lindt purchased the San Francisco-based chocolate company Ghirardelli back in 1998.

22A Dub over? : RENAME

Kneel, and a monarch might “dub thee a knight” if you’re lucky. “Dub” is a specific term derived from Old English that was used to mean “make a knight”. As the knight was also given a knightly name at the same time, “dub” came to mean “give someone a name”.

24A Cuatro y dos : SEIS

In Spanish, “cuatro y dos” (four plus two) is “seis” (six).

26A Business magnate Condé : NAST

Condé Nast is a mass media corporation that has a very large portfolio of publications, including “Vogue”, “GQ”, “House and Garden”, “Wired”, “Vanity Fair” and “The New Yorker”.

35A Start of an incantation : ABRA

The incantation “abracadabra” has a long history. It was used as far back as the 2nd century AD in ancient Rome when the word was prescribed by a physician to be worn on an amulet to help his emperor recover from disease. “Abracadabra” is Aramaic, and roughly translates as “I will create as I speak”.

37A Pastoral sound : MOO

The term “pastoral” means “relating to the countryside”, or more specifically “relating to shepherds”. “Pastor” is Latin for “shepherd”.

43A Pro device : IPAD

The iPad Pro tablet computer, when it was released in November 2015, featured a larger screen than all prior iPad models. The iPad Pro also came with some interesting accessories, including an attachable keyboard and the Apple Pencil.

52A Scenes on Black Friday : CROWDS

In the world of retail, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the US. It is also the day when many stores start the holiday shopping season, and so offer deep discounts to get ahead of the competition.

56A Kaitlin of “Hacks” : OLSON

Actress and comedian Kaitlin Olson is perhaps best known to TV audiences, playing Deandra “Sweet Dee” Reynolds on the sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and the lead character Morgan Gillory on the entertaining crime comedy show “High Potential”. Olson started dating the creator and star of “It’s Always Sunny …”, Rob McElhenney, during the show’s second season, and the couple married in 2008.

59A Pawn : HOCK

The phrase “in hock” is an American invention. Back in the mid-19th century “in hock” meant both “in debt” and “in prison”. The word “hock” comes from the Dutch “hok” meaning “jail”.

61A Addendum to the five W’s : HOW

The Five Ws (or “Five Ws and one H”) is a journalistic concept used for gathering information. For a story to be complete, six questions need to be answered:

1. Who is it about?
2. What happened?
3. Where did it take place?
4. When did it take place?
5. Why did it happen?
6. How did it happen?

62A Female antelopes : DOES

“Antelope” is the name given to just over 90 species of deer-like mammals. As a group, antelopes aren’t defined taxonomically, although they might be described as all members of the family Bovidae that aren’t sheep, cattle or goats.

63A “‘___’ is the thing with feathers” (Emily Dickinson poem) : HOPE

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems in her lifetime, with less than a dozen published before she died in 1886. Emily’s younger sister discovered the enormous collection, and it was published in batches over the coming decades.

65A Top of a mosque, often : DOME

“Masjid” is an Arabic word meaning “temple, place of worship”. It is from “masjid” that we get the English word “mosque”.

67A Central Plains people : OTOE

The Otoe (also “Oto”) Native American tribe originated in the Great Lakes region as part of the Winnebago or Siouan tribes. The group that would become the Otoe broke away from the Winnebago and migrated southwestward, ending up in the Great Plains. In the plains the Otoe adopted a semi-nomadic lifestyle dependent on the horse, with the American bison becoming central to their diet.

Down

20D Reddit Q&A sesh : AMA

Reddit.com is a networking and news website that started up in 2005. It is essentially a bulletin board system with posts that are voted up and down by users, which determines the ranking of posts. The name “Reddit” is a play on “read it”, as in “I read it on Reddit”. One popular feature of the Reddit site is an online forum that is similar to a press conference. Known as an AMA (for “ask me anything”), participants have included the likes of President Barack Obama, Madonna, Bill Gates, Stephen Colbert and Gordon Ramsay. President Obama’s AMA was so popular that the high level of traffic brought down many parts of the Reddit site.

21D Purple shade : LILAC

The ornamental flowering plant known as lilac is native to the Balkans, and is a member of the olive family.

23D Prefix with body or bacterial : ANTI-

Antibodies are y-shaped proteins that recognize antigens on foreign bodies in the body such as bacteria and viruses. The antibodies combine with those foreign bodies and neutralize them.

29D One way to run : AMOK

The phrase “to run amok” (sometimes “to run amuck”) has been around since the 1670s and is derived from the Malay word for “attacking furiously”, “amuk”. The word “amok” was also used as a noun to describe Malay natives who were “frenzied”. Given Malaya’s troubled history, the natives probably had a good reason for that frenzy …

39D Canon competitor : NIKON

The Japanese company Nikon was founded in 1917 with the merger of three manufacturers of various optical devices. After the merger, Nikon’s main output was lenses (including the first lenses for Canon cameras, before Canon made its own). During the war, Nikon sales grew rapidly as the company focused on (pun!) equipment for the military including periscopes and bomb sights.

40D ___ facto : IPSO

“Ipso facto” is Latin, a phrase meaning “by the fact itself”. It describes something that is a direct consequence of a particular act, as opposed to something that is the result of some subsequent event. For example, my father was born in Dublin and was an Irish citizen, ipso facto. My son was born in California and is an Irish citizen by virtue of being the son of an Irish citizen (i.e. “not” ipso facto).

51D Telegram and Simple Dialer, for two : PHONE APPS

Telegram Messenger (often just “Telegram”) is a cloud-based instant messaging app with a focus on security and speed. Founded by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2013, it quickly gained popularity for its commitment to user privacy. It is known for its end-to-end encrypted chats, large group chat capabilities, and features like self-destructing messages. Telegram’s main competitor is WhatsApp.

53D Cannellini, e.g. : WHITE BEAN

Kidney beans are so called due to their shape resembling human kidneys. Red kidney beans are used a lot in chili con carne recipes, and in Indian dishes. White kidney beans go by their Italian name, “cannellini”, in Britain and Ireland.

56D Expert employed by a sportsbook : ODDS MAKER

A sportsbook is a place that accepts bets on sporting events. The name comes from:

• Sports: it accepts wagers on various sports, duh …
• Book: a reference to the ledgers that “bookmakers” (or “bookies”) traditionally used to keep track of all the bets and odds.

64D Andy Warhol, e.g. : POP ARTIST

An artistic work in the pop art style includes images taken from popular culture, perhaps from the news or an advertisement. The pop art movement started in the mid-fifties in Britain and emerged in the late-fifties in the US. One of the more famous pop artists was American Andy Warhol.

American artist Andy Warhol was a leader in the pop art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s. Many of his works became the most expensive paintings ever sold. A 1963 Warhol canvas titled “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” fetched over 100 million dollars in 2013.