Latin Crossword

Question

Proposal: Latin Language

'The Times' (of London) has recently introduced a Latin Crossword, in which the answers are in Latin, but the clues are a mixture of Latin, references to quotations and (sometimes semi-cryptic) English.

Would questions about this be on-topic? Specifically, would "What's the answer to 2 down?" be acceptable, considering that it might be impossible to know whether this is a point of Latin grammar (on-topic), a quotation (on-topic but probably uninteresting) or multi-lingual wordplay (probably off-topic) till you have the answer?

Answer 1

Without seeing the crossword puzzle I don't think "what is the answer to 2 down" is a very good question. (Do you think such a question should be on-topic on ELU?) I think ideally, the question itself should be interesting to read. If you've solved half a crossword puzzle and just ask "tell me the answer to 2 down", there isn't much that would make this question a good question.

The text on the upvote button says

This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear

We don't see any research effort (maybe you've racked your brain, but we don't know that); it is certainly not useful to know a 5-letter synonym of some word with the letter U in the fourth position.

That said, I think that more elaborate word/synonym requests could be good questions, provided they show research effort and are useful, even if they're motivated by a crossword puzzle.