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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Tuesday, September 8
What do these five words have in common: audience, vista, tangent, redolent, gusto?

Hint Consider the words' roots. (If you don't know the roots, try to think of similar-sounding words that might be related!)

   


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Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

Sometimes the titles of instrumental pieces of music can be kind of random. Sometimes they aren't.
Listen to the five clips at left. Can you match them with their titles?

  1. "So What"
  2. "Lollapalooza"
  3. "Shave and a Haircut"
  4. "Salt Peanuts"
  5. "Watermelon Man"

Solution
  1. d
  2. b
  3. a
  4. e
  5. c
If you're a jazz aficionado, you may have known some of these cold, but that wasn't the point of the puzzle! Listen carefully to each clip and you can hear the melody "speak" the title—or at least the rhythm of the title. For example, the three-note octave motif played six times by the solo trumpet in clip #1—low high-low—mimics the intonation of "salt peanuts" (it helps to imagine someone hawking peanuts at a baseball game, maybe).

"Shave and a Haircut" was meant to clue you in to the theme, since I figured most folks would know that the "lyrics" are "Shave and a haircut, two bits!" If you didn't know that, well, hopefully you guessed right between that one and "Lollapalooza", because both titles have five syllables with approximately the same rhythm.

Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Yana, Leo S., Graham, Jason, Dr. Yetman, and the families of Maddy and Peter M. (Looks like the adults win this round.) Thanks to everybody who made a guess!

About This Site

Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."

Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.

Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to June 2020.