Tinker-Evers-Chance

[molenick]

Originally Posted by FrankWakefield

Yoda, Please consider this a tweak of Mark's response about gonfalon...

Franklin Pierce Adams wrote that... read about him in Wiki. He was super literate, as were the others in the Algonquin Round table (read about that, in Wiki, too).

So, at the time, the New York Times crossword puzzle had not used the word GONFALON in the clues for a word, nor as a word for a puzzle. It was THAT to which he was referring, bursting THAT bubble. These folks were all about the words... hence the way that poem is written.

While fine tuning my answer to that, I came across the 15 letter aspect of the 3 players, and I don't recall ever encountering that before...

The last name, plus the position... when the letters for that are added the total for each is 15.

Tinker 6 short 5 stop 4 6+5+4=15
Evers 5 second 6 base 4 5+6+4=15
Chance 6 first 5 base 4 6+5+4=15

What does that mean?

1- the 15 letter thing is a huge coincidence.

2- these Roundtable guys (and a few gals) were really digging into every sentence, word, letter count, and definition that might be associated in some way that they've overlooked.

Just a little tweak to Frank's comments. The poem was published in 1910. While word games in a grid existed before then, the first modern crossword as we know it was not published until 1913 and the NY Times did not publish one until 1942.

And while Adams was later a member of the Algonquin Round Table, the heyday of that group was 1919-1929.

I am not sure about the rest of the analysis but I always interpreted "pricking our gonfalon bubble" to mean "ruining our chances to win the pennant". I never thought it meant "the word gonfalon has not appeared in the NY Times crossword puzzle".

But maybe I am misreading Franks's comments.