Grandma Girl here, I'm Mignon Folkardy. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. And today we have other cool stuff because I'm talking with Ben Zimmer

language columnist for the Wall Street Journal vocabulary judge for the

Scripps National Spelling Bee chair of the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society, and for our purposes today,

the most important thing, crossword constructor for Slate, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others. Welcome, Ben.

Thanks, Minion.

Great to be here.

Yeah, I have been enjoying your writings about the crossword puzzle so much lately.

I had no idea it was such a new thing. Can you talk about just

sort of the anniversary that we're having now? Yeah well it's the

hundredth anniversary of when Crosswords really hit the big time in

1924. Crosswords had actually existed for more than a decade before that.

So the creation of the first Crossword puzzle was in 1913 a fellow named Arthur Wynne

who worked at the New York World, the newspaper in the New York World, came up with the cross crossword he originally called it a word cross and then apparently the second time he did it they made a mistake actually in printing it and so Word Cross became crossword.

That's how it was amazing.

Through a mistake at the press.

But they just went with it.

And for about a decade, it was, you know, a semi-popular type of thing.

The New York world kept running it.

Arthur Wynne ended up passing the editorial work

to a young woman named Margaret Petherbridge who would later

under her married name become known as Margaret Fowler. But you, and there were,

Which will become important later.

...