This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, search for meaning in a bowl of alphabetti.

Let's warm up for today's show with a little word history.

Today, we are talking about junk, not the rather vulgar slang for genitals, but in this

sense of rubbish.

This arose from the 14th century meaning of junk, which was the nautical term for rope,

and it evolved to mean the crap left behind by ships, and from that to mean any old crap

at all.

On with the show.

Tomb ends in one century, Livid Gloss Puzzles, 710.

That's your clue for what this episode is about.

As I'm sure you deduced cryptic crosswords, or as I like to call them, infuriating word

puzzles that I can't do.

On a good day, I can get maybe four clues.

I think I'm forted pretty quickly by my ineptitude at divorcing a word from its meaning

in that context, which if you've been listening to the illusionist since the beginning, you'll

remember was one of the reasons I am averse to puns.

So I'll blame my shoddy cryptic crossword ability on my suspicion that the clues are puns.

Puns does not always work when you write it down, because people have different ways

of pronouncing different words.

Clues can be analogous to them, but I think clues are more like jokes, and that's kind

of what I keep falling back on.

If you can tell jokes, and if you can understand jokes when other people tell them, I think

...