Okay, let me walk you through how I tackled this one the other day. I was sitting down with my usual morning crossword, coffee in hand, you know how it is.
Hitting the Clue
So, I’m cruising along, filling in some of the easier ones, and then I hit this clue: “barely polite”. Five letters. My first thought immediately went to words like RUDE or maybe SHORT? But RUDE didn’t feel quite right for “barely polite”, it felt too strong, like impolite. And SHORT… well, it fit the letter count sometimes, but it didn’t quite capture that feeling of just scraping by on the politeness scale.
Thinking it Through
I started thinking about situations where someone is just barely being polite. You know, when they say something, but it’s got an edge to it, or it’s really blunt. What words describe that?
- BLUNT: Fits the five letters. Seems plausible. Someone blunt isn’t necessarily impolite, but they aren’t going out of their way to be nice either.
- CURT: This one is only four letters, so that was out.
- TERSE: Five letters again. This felt really close. Like, when someone gives you a one-word answer. It’s not outright rude, but it’s definitely not warm.
At this point, I had a couple of possibilities: BLUNT and TERSE. I looked at the crossing letters I already had filled in. Let’s say the grid looked something like T _ _ S _. Okay, that made it pretty obvious.
Getting the Answer
With the T at the beginning and the S at the end, TERSE just slotted right in. It made perfect sense with the clue “barely polite”. A terse response is short, maybe a bit sharp, and definitely lacks warmth, hitting that ‘barely polite’ definition right on the head.
It wasn’t the hardest clue ever, but it required a little bit of thinking beyond the most obvious first guess. Felt good to slot that one in and move on. Sometimes it’s just about finding the word with the right shade of meaning, you know?
