I was like, “Is there a quantity for frequency in Italian?” And then I was like, is there a missing question mark here, and it’s doing something tricky with “of ten”? (Clearly I still have cryptics on the brain.) And so then I was like, no it’s simpler than that, ‘Number’ is probably like ‘ether’ or something, like an anesthetic. And but so then I started counting numbers in English and Italian and after getting nowhere, I turned on my favorite opera, The Barber of Seville and, oh. OK, that last part didn’t happen, but it could have, and if you feel foolish for believing me, imagine how I felt for missing the third possibility for “number” here, as in a musical, as in an opera, as in an ARIA. I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes it’s nice to be fooled.
- Peter Gordon, The New York Times, 3/9/22
The Crossword Scholar 