Palsy

The one blog I read every day is Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle. Rex provides valuable insights into the subtleties of every day's puzzle, their use of tired words, video illustrations of featured words, etc. It is followed with lively discussion of the puzzle and Rex's write-up. It starts out with a "Word of the Day" that showed up in the puzzle. I also am a fan of Rex's Facebook page.

In today's puzzle Rex was stumped by how one of the answers and its clue were related. The clue was "Tight" and the answer was "palsy." Rex posted a plea on his Facebook page asking for an explanation without giving away the answer (this was before he posted his evaluation of the puzzle).

I had been confused about that answer, too. I was hesitant to press the "Done" button to submit my solution because that made no sense to me, either. But all the words crossing "palsy" were clearly right so I hit Done. I got the "Thank you for playing" message that says I've successfully completed the puzzle. My jaw dropped.

I went back to the puzzle and stared at that one again to see if I could figure it out. It finally came to me that it was just half of the word "palsy-walsy."

A few minutes later I happened to look at Facebook and there was Rex's question in my newsfeed. It had no comments yet so I offered one.

"Palsy" is the Word of the Day in today's puzzle write-up. And Rex thanked me for the "comprehension assist"! I am so thrilled!

Perhaps "palsy" is a new entry in my sister's collection of heteronyms, words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and different origins.