This Week’s Clue Was Much Badu About Nothing

Have you done this week's crosswords?

Manage newsletters The Daily Beast Crossword is where power, pop culture, and politics intersect—quite literally.   Designed to be more challenging throughout the week, you can test your knowledge with five puzzles each week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday. Play This Week's Puzzles Get in the Game With Matt Gaffney I liked using [Badu who sings "On & On"] for ERYKAH in Thursday's puzzle. Because she's an excellent singer/songwriter? Sure, but also because you see BADU much more often in crosswords than ERYKAH, so it was nice to get the other half of her name in the grid.   BADU has appeared six times in the New York Times during the Will Shortz Era, but ERYKAH never has. Why not? A few reasons:   1) ERYKAH is a longer entry, and there generally will be more 4-letter entries in a grid where BADU might fit than 6-letter entries where ERYKAH might go.   2) ERYKAH has three slightly less-commonly used letters in it: Y, K, and H. Not that these are dealbreakers, just that they make things a little tougher than a name like ANDREA, whose letters are all very common.    3) ERYKAH is six letters long, and there are many more possible 6-letter entries than 4-letter ones like BADU, simply because there are far more possible combinations of six letters than four.    4) That final U in BADU is very handy; if a constructor has ???U in a grid, then choices are limited.   In that same vein, crossword writers get a little jolt of pride when they use a longer surname instead of a common crossword first name. So DIFRANCO or DUVERNAY in a grid is fun since we see ANI and AVA all the time, but so often their last names only show up in the clues.   Got an underused/well-used first/last name pairing you'd like to see in a grid? Tweet it to #beastxword and I'll see what I can do.  Play This Week's Puzzles © Copyright 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC  555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011  Privacy Policy If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, click here to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can safely unsubscribe.