Peace, Land, Bread
Our daughter, Becca, who also constructs acrostics and is our initial beta tester, found this week’s quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm and made an initial effort to build a puzzle from it using an “Old MacDonald” theme – pigs, horses, chickens, etc. After some discussion with us, she agreed that the quote and its source also lent itself to an acrostic themed to the Russian Revolution and, more broadly, to Russia. We took it from there.
While Orwell wrote Animal Farm as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel still has much to say about the perils of totalitarianism and demagoguery very much extant in our world today. We don’t know how much the novel is taught these days in middle school English classes, as it was when we were teenagers, but we see it as a cautionary tale for people of all ages and for all time. Let’s beware of simplistic slogans like “Peace, Land, Bread,” which offered the Russian people a set of ultimately empty promises.
The image above is of Anastasia Romanov, the Grand Duchess who found her way into Answer Q of this week’s puzzle. Animal Farm did much to deromanticize the Russian Revolution but could not dampen decades of romantic intrigue that swirled around the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra following the events of 1918, as a bevy of pretenders tried to assume her identity. Mick Jagger even got into the act, adding a reference to her in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” a song supposedly inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
As often happens, we learned some things in constructing this puzzle. Perhaps some of you knew that muscovite is a type of mica, or that the Nazis burned the books of the German philosopher Friedrich Engels. Both of these tidbits came as news to us. What did you find new or surprising in this week’s acrostic?
In other news, on December 8 the Washington Post ran an article profiling Hilda Jaffe, who is 102 years old and counting. The piece, which described Ms. Jaffe as “sharp as a tack,” followed her through her daily Manhattan routine, and suggested hints as to the secrets of her longevity and mental acuity. One of our colleagues called to our attention this arresting photograph, included in the article:
Photo credit: Jackie Molloy for KFF Health News
She’s working on the opera-themed puzzle that ran a few weeks back … and doing it in pen. Zowie!
Poppycock is a wonderful word from the Dutch which makes it a strange name for a snack food.
Totally enjoyable Acrostic. Nice job!
Another splendid acrostic. Many thanks! And how satisfying it must be that it’s now a full family undertaking.
Wonderful to read again that seminal quote from Animal Farm. It’s a pity it’s not assigned more widely today in middle schools. It’s easy to read, yet has sufficient depth to spark spirited discussion from ages 13 and up.
What did I find “new or surprising” in the puzzle? Well, I’d heard of the word “rhumb” before, but I only vaguely knew it had some cartographical meaning. It was satisfying to get it locked down.
Also nice to see the word “glasnost” again. (Sadly, we don’t see much of any type of transparency in Putin’s Russia today.)
Wouldn’t it be a kick if there was a renaissance of using poppycock, balderdash or, best of all, flapdoodle, to describe nonsense, as opposed to the blunderbuss, unimaginative contemporary “bulls—t”? (I’m also dying to call someone a poltroon, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.)
Here’s an idea for getting the Acrostic back in the Times lineup of online puzzles (I never, by the way, got a convincing explanation for its disappearance). Let’s just start a rumor that Miss Jaffe‘s long life and ardor for the puzzle definitively proves that the acrostic is the secret to long life and mental acuity well into your second century! That should do the trick. 😉
Thanks for another devious puzzle. I only had 3 answers to start. When I had the first clue containing ____N_S_ I was sure it was a word ending in -NESS. Even when I found it started with G, I thought “Something like openness, glasnost but ending in -NESS!” When I snapped awake it broke open the puzzle.
I saw RHUMB only after the puzzle was done, don’t ever remember seeing it before. Learning this new word makes me want to do a little Cuban dance!
I’m thrilled that Ms. Jaffe demonstrates the importance of a biweekly acrostic to a long life…And I approve of her using a pen, which I used to do. Not that I never made mistakes, it’s just…well, I’m not going tp frame it when I’m done, right? Let it look sloppy!
A brilliant quote to choose for this moment. And a reminder of the prophetic work of Orwell. once I got that last word, the whole puzzle filled itself in pretty quickly.
A brilliant quote to choose for this moment. And a reminder of the prophetic work of Orwell. once I got that last word, the whole puzzle filled itself in pretty quickly.
Rhumb is totally new to me, and if I knew of Octoberists they are long lost to memory. Thanks to your daughter for bringing Animal Farm back–a good time to think about it–and a fun puzzle to spring from it. The irony of the quote isn’t lost….I wonder what Orwell would say about our mostly virtual lives today.
What a delightful acrostic. I was thinking the quote would be something Russian Revolution related, and was thinking Lenin?, Trotsky?, hmm. I broke out in a big smile when I saw that the quote was from Amimal Farm. OCTOBRIST escaped me for awhile. Bolshevik fit, but wasn’t accurate. Decembrist didn’t fit. So I just waited until I got enough letters from the quote and voila! Bonus points for including FLAPDOODLE, a word I’ve been fond of ever since first encountering it in Huckleberry Finn. I’m still delaying working on the acrostic in Puzzle Mania. I’m saving it for a day when I feel like treating myself
Thank you, Becca, David, Jane and commenters, for the pleasure of the acrostic and your posts. My writing skills are limited to.filling in the quote, so will just say I appreciated the challenge of the puzzle and hearing your thoughts. New to me, too: RHUMB.
I believe I first read “Animal Farm” in my early teens. I did reread it recently and found it still marvelous. I moved on to “1984” (much scarier) at age 15. Saw the recent S.F. Opera production of “A Handmaid’s Tale.” I think it’s good that these topics are being discussed. I lived in Japan when Gorbachev and his wife made the news when they laid a wreath at the Peace Park in Hiroshima. We need to keep working in that direction. In the clues and words, I learned of Stuart M. Kaminsky, that Russophile wasn’t just something I made up, and I join with the others in learning Rhumb.
Jane and David,
We’ve been enjoying your biweekly acrostics ever since we discovered them last spring. This one from “Animal Farm” is one of your very best. The quote seems especially pertinent today. We struggled initially until we came up with “Glasnost” and “Muscovite”. Then the “G” at the beginning and the “M” at the end, along with the Russian connection, led us to the author and the title. It was clear sailing from then on. Please keep up the great work — we very much look forward to your every-other-Sunday puzzles.
Dear Solvers,
There’s a lot of learning going on here! We often learn fun facts and new words in constructing these puzzles. Some of you have indicated that you’ve learned things while solving them. And we, in turn, learn from your posts. For example, we didn’t know the Dutch origins of the word “poppycock,” nor did we recall that “flapdoodle” appeared in Huckleberry Finn. (We actually found the latter word in a fun book our daughter gave us that some of you word enthusiasts might enjoy: The Little Book of Lost Words, by Joe Gillard.)
Dave had come upon the word “rhumb” as part of the phrase “rhumb line,” a term used by geographers with whom he worked at the U.S. State Department.