It’s a perfectly normal word, though not a very common one. Not a movie reference or a Japanese loanword or anything like that. You might be more familiar with
AILMENT, meaning an illness—literally it’s a thing that afflicts you. Or you might have heard a person or thing described as AILING, meaning sick; same idea. (Though there’s something a bit odd going on there; usually “to ail” is transitive, so that X ails Y when X causes trouble for Y, but in “ailing” it’s intransitive and Y ails when something causes trouble for Y. Verbs that work this way are called “ergative” or “labile”. There are actually quite a lot of them in English.) I’ve sometimes seen “what ails you?” meaning “what’s the matter?”.
Can’t speak for Charlie but that did shake loose a memory to make 79 across make sense to me.
Still stumped on 102 across though.
It’s a perfectly normal word, though not a very common one. Not a movie reference or a Japanese loanword or anything like that. You might be more familiar with
AILMENT, meaning an illness—literally it’s a thing that afflicts you. Or you might have heard a person or thing described as AILING, meaning sick; same idea. (Though there’s something a bit odd going on there; usually “to ail” is transitive, so that X ails Y when X causes trouble for Y, but in “ailing” it’s intransitive and Y ails when something causes trouble for Y. Verbs that work this way are called “ergative” or “labile”. There are actually quite a lot of them in English.) I’ve sometimes seen “what ails you?” meaning “what’s the matter?”.
Ah, that explains it, I was misspelling the name of the “greatest Laker”. So what I had in for “afflict” wasn’t a word.