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You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. The finals of the annual

American Crossword Puzzle Tournament are always exciting. You have hundreds of people in a

ballroom of a New York City hotel and they're all watching these finalists who are

standing there at the front in front of easels trying to work these giant versions

of an incredibly hard crossword puzzle and they're wearing these noise cancelling headphones and

Grant you remember that right because you did color commentary that's right

back in the day and there's other noise in the room too. People are moaning if they see an error because you can see the solution, right?

The contestants can't see it.

But what I didn't know until I read it in the blog of Deb Amlin, who blogs about crossword puzzles for the New York Times,

I didn't know that the white noise that they're listening to in their noise canceling headphones is a recording of hundreds of

voices speaking in different languages at a United Nations cocktail party.

Whoa! Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy?

So in case there was a real voice accidentally slipping through,

it's going to be completely disguised

by the voices in the headphones.

...