Solution to Evan Birnholz’s Jan. 17 Post Magazine crossword, “Captain Obvious Starts a Book Club”

A few other answers and clues:

  • 1A: [Captain once portrayed by Patrick Stewart] is AHAB. He filmed this role in 1997, a couple of years after he filmed his final episode as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
  • 25A: [No comment?] is DENIAL. You have to interpret it as “comment in which you say ‘no.’”
  • 64A: [“Arrested Development” character whose specialty is 84 Down] is GOB and 84D: [Breaking out of a sealed box or walking on water, seemingly] is MAGIC. Fans of the show may remember that Gob attempted both of the illusions mentioned in the MAGIC clue.
  • 9D: [Motion pictures?] is CARTOON. My favorite clue today.
  • 46D: [2004 comedy set at North Shore High School] is MEAN GIRLS. Amusing side-story from my past: The movie takes place in Evanston, Illinois, and I’ve heard the school was based on New Trier High School in Winnetka, which is about ten minutes away from Evanston. I went to a small high school in Winnetka called North Shore Country Day. New Trier is a very large school and it probably did have more influence on Tina Fey more when she wrote the screenplay, but I always like to think my school served as greater inspiration — at least for the “Mean Girls” school name.
  • 76D: [“Man, I’m gonna be sore for a week after bench-pressing 350 pounds,” e.g.] is HUMBLEBRAG. There’s an interesting psychological theory about why humblebragging tends to annoy people as much as it does: Egotistically boasting while appealing to people’s sympathy forces people to have two completely opposite reactions at the same time.

Finally, I wanted to share something about my personal background and how it relates to Captain Obvious (as odd as that might sound).

When I was very young, maybe six years old, my parents had me meet with a few education specialists to do some testing. I don’t remember what the tests were, but they had something to do with vocabulary, word association, memory, pattern recognition, and maybe visual or spatial learning. They told my parents I had a problem known as semantic-pragmatic disorder. It doesn’t go by that name anymore; these days it’s called social communication disorder. Anyhow, it’s a language impairment that makes it hard to communicate with others because you have difficulty understanding different elements of language.

This had two main practical effects. First, I had trouble staying on-topic with most conversations. A little kid’s brain might jump from thought to thought in rapid succession, but in my case there wasn’t a great way to follow my train of thought at all. I would hear my parents or a teacher utter a specific phrase, and that would often trigger for me a memory of some tangentially related phrase from a completely different context — for example, a line from a movie that I’d watched — and I assumed that I could say it and others would understand what I was thinking and how I arrived there. To everyone else, it made no sense whatsoever. In regular conversation, there’s a logical progression that leads people from A to B to C and so on, or at least most of the sentences you say to someone else have some coherent relation to one another. But if someone started a conversation with A, that would send me not to B but to a train of thought all the way to some distant thought like L or M, and I would come out and say that, which left people confused. This might seem like a benign problem to have, but consider that this was a daily communication breakdown that made conversations very hard for me to understand and participate in, especially with other kids, who don’t have the same faculty of language or understanding of behavior that adults do.

The second effect was that I had a difficult time understanding that words or phrases can have different meanings depending on the situation. This meant that I would take expressions and idioms literally. If someone uttered the phrase “the elephant in the room,” I could not understand how that meant anything besides an actual live elephant being in a room, rather than a figure of speech for “a big problem that everyone is avoiding.” It also meant that I struggled mightily at understanding jokes, especially ones that relied on wordplay in some way. All kids have some barrier to overcome when it comes to understanding idioms when they’re learning language and vocabulary, but this was a problem that persisted well into my teenage years. I met with speech therapists all the time, doing repetitive vocab drills with flash cards or multiple-choice quizzes and, I’m sure, several other teaching tools just to get me more comfortable with the basics of having a regular conversation. Can you imagine being an adolescent and still struggling all the time with the basic human function of understanding why a joke is funny? It was painful, to say the least.

My semantic-pragmatic (or social communication) disorder hasn’t gone away entirely. It’s not something that can really be cured. I don’t even have a good answer for how I was able to manage it other than just getting older and expanding my vocab and talking to lots of people over time. But it still blows my mind sometimes that this kid who couldn’t get why a joke was funny and couldn’t tell a joke without confusing everyone eventually grew up to become someone who uses wordplay and turns of phrase while writing crosswords for a living. Captain Obvious isn’t just a random character that I find amusing; he’s my way of acknowledging that part of my childhood. I took expressions literally, and so does he. He’s a way of channeling those random leaps in my train of thought from my youth into a joke that you may not have expected. My hope is that he makes you laugh a little, rather than frustrate you.

Anyway, what did you think of the puzzle?

Source: WP