Who knows why but I've gotten into KenKen ... it started with Sudoku, but they got kind of boring after a while. So, for the first time in decades (since I abandoned crosswords as an undergrad), I'm looking at the puzzles-games page in the local paper. The word games generally strike me as kind of cute but not not really engaging. One, though, bugs me about every time I look at it. Usually it's that I don't find the solution of the puzzle to have any umpf to it or any cleverness. This morning, it was worse:
If you solve it, or look at the solution, you see that the intent is to get you to read "On S - T is the best policy". I'm pretty sure I would never describe the picture that way, even if prompted very directly. I might say that 'best and policy are over S and T' or something. The noun phrase ("the best policy") is impossible for me here, maybe because they don't seem like a unit in any way. That's kind of how this puzzle usually works, though. (For other examples, see
here.)
But my real annoyance at this particular one is dialectal: "On S - T" sounds like
honesty only if you pronounce on to rhyme with
Ron and not like the word
own. This holds for a relatively small area of the United States, if a heavily populated one. According to the
Atlas of North American English (Map 14.2, p. 189 — if you have a university account, you can probably download a full pdf of it, and access the whole
Atlas on-line, with stuff even the printed book doesn't have), a strip from New York City through basically the Northern Cities area and somewhat farther west into Iowa and Minnesota.
We need dialect awareness in the Whatzit!
