Maleskan

comparative more Maleskan · superlative most Maleskan

1. Of or pertaining to the style or tenure of New York Times crossword puzzle editor Eugene Maleska, thought now to feature needless obscurity and difficulty.

   A typical Maleskan stepquote's theme answer might read: THEFA/ASHIO/ONWEAR/RSOUTMOREAPPA/ARELTH/HANTH/HEMAN: " The fashion wears out more apparel than the man."

   2020 March 17, Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them, Penguin, →ISBN, page 44

   2 more examples

   I was lulled into a false sense of confidence in the northeast, continued my way down the grid, and found that I kept stopping to marvel at the Things That Seemed Eerily Maleskan.

   2012 October 25, Deb Amlen, “Truncated Parlor Piece”, in The New York Times

   It launched at exactly the right time to capture the younger generation of puzzlemakers and solvers, the ones who felt that the clue for OREO should be "Kind of cookie" rather than the Maleskan “Mountain: prefix" (as in the "famous" oreortyx, the mountain quail).

   2013 May 1, T. Campbell, On Crosswords: Thoughts, Studies, Facts and Snark About a 100-Year-Old Pastime, Morgan James Publishing, →ISBN, page 21