Monkey business

The rate of complaints about falling standards of literacy and evidence of a lack of basic education on the part of your crossword editor continues unabated. For example, Quick No 13,542 (3 October, 21 across) had "Monkey (3)" as a clue for APE. "But an ape is not a monkey" came the protests, more in pity than in anger, I felt. It is true, of course, that zoologically an ape is a large primate without a tail that lives on the ground, whereas a monkey is a small to medium primate, usually with a long tail and usually lives in trees. (To confuse things a bit more, a Barbary ape is not an ape but a monkey and lives in Gibraltar, where there are few trees.) In the same way, for us older folk, there cannot be more than two alternatives, "continual" does not mean the same thing as "continuous" and to expect and to anticipate involve quite different attitudes to future events.

On the other hand, language is continually (indeed continuously) moving on and I have remarked here before that the pace of change has accelerated hugely with the digital revolution and emails, with Google, with mobile phones and texting, with the Americanisation of everything and the globalisation of English. In the past the dictionary people looked almost wholly to written and printed matter as evidence of how the language was evolving. Today the electronic media are very much the engine of change. I also suspect that, with the competition from online dictionaries and the introduction of their own online editions, there are commercial pressures on traditional dictionary publishers to "move with the times" more than has been the case in the past.

It is certainly the case that our dictionaries are increasingly validating popular usages of previously restricted words. Thus I was able to handle the APE problem by pointing out that the Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, says of "monkey": (in general use) any primate. (In passing, it also now seems that you can have any number of alternatives and that continual/continuous and expect/anticipate are effectively synonyms.) With the help of the Oxford Dictionary of English, when several people abused me for my gross misuse of a mathematical term for writing last month that "the American linguistic invasion has accelerated exponentially in the last fifteen years", I was able to reply that, while "exponential" mathematically means "expressed by a mathematical exponent" (as in an exponential curve), this meaning is now given second place in the Oxford Dictionary of English, below the prime meaning of "becoming more and more rapid". Dave from South Australia said that the word was one of his pet hates. We all have words that are pet hates. Mine include "firstly" and "commence". But, in my book, being hateful is different from being wrong.
_______

In case this fact has somehow escaped your attention, 2013 is being treated as the official centenary year of the modern crossword, with Sunday 21 December 1913 as C-Day itself and the New York World the publication where the first one appeared. There have been events all over the country, using this centenary to bring the joys of crosswording to new audiences, generating quite a bit of media interest. On 23 September our own Paul (John Halpern) spoke before an audience of 4,000 at a TEDx event at the Royal Albert Hall in London about setting and solving crosswords.
_______

Another beneficiary of the fallout from the Year of the Crossword is Rufus (Roger Squires). As attentive readers of the Shropshire Star will know (Rufus lives in Shropshire), the paper last month reported that Roger has been restored to the Guiness Book of Records. He featured in it for 30 years, from 1978 to 2008, as the most prolific crossword setter in the world, but was then expelled on the grounds that the GBR was mainly aimed at 11- to 15-year-olds "who weren't interested in crosswords". Helped by the centenary coverage, he is now back in the 2014 edition, which was published at the end of last month. Rufus has been setting regularly for the Guardian since 1982 and has had his puzzles published in almost 500 publications in this country and around the English-speaking world. I think my favourite Rufus anagram is: "All of a tingle, perhaps" for FLAGELLATION.
_______

The September papal Genius attracted 202 entries, 18 of them on the first day. The first in was PSC from Australia at 02:55.

Congratulations to David Rabjohns from Swansea, who is the winner of our August Genius puzzle.
_______

We hope you enjoy our crossword service. If you have any technical problems with it, please email userhelp@theguardian.com. If you have any comments or queries about the crosswords, please email crossword.editor@theguardian.com. For Observer crosswords please crossword.editor@observer.co.uk.