This puzzle speaks for itself; so I’ll devote this space not to praising my own work, but attacking that of other constructors—specifically those constructors who don’t exercise reasonable restraint in fill related to “Star Wars.” LEIA is fine, I suppose, and HAN, though I prefer the Chinese dynasty. ARTOO is useful, but a casual watcher of only the first two movies (me, for example) will remember the name as R2D2. “There is no try,” commonly used in YODA clues, is maybe the stupidest, most annoyingly meaningless adage ever fobbed off as wisdom by anyone anywhere. But what really infuriates me is WOOKIEE. Everybody in “Star Wars” speaks English, though that is presumably not the language of the galaxy far, far away in which the series is set. That language is, one must suppose, being translated, and—since its speakers presumably did not coincidentally invent the Roman alphabet—transliterated as well, into English. But what possible rule of transliteration would explain the soundless extra E at the end of WOOKIEE? It doesn’t make any sense. Why torment the solver with it? Let’s everybody stop.
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