I usually do the New York Times “Connections” puzzle first thing every day. The idea is to divide a grid of sixteen words into four groups of four related words each: for example, four names of sports teams, four words that mean yelling at someone, four words whose first syllable is the name of an insect, and so on. It doesn’t take long and is often clever, because a single word can suggest multiple themes for a group.

The puzzle for May 14, however, featured an egregious instance of bad Spanish. The four groups were as follows:

The problem here, of course, is that the third word in the list of Spanish pronouns (sus) isn’t a pronoun. It’s a possessive adjective, meaning ‘his,’ ‘her,’ ‘your,’ or ‘their,’ depending on context. An example might be No me gustan sus ejemplos ‘I don’t like your examples.’

I immediately complained to the Times via the feedback link on their puzzle page. Apparently many other puzzlers did, too, because the name of the fourth category was soon modified to “Spanish pronouns”:

This new category name is certainly awkward. (A better solution would have been to swap in an actual pronoun instead of sus.) To be fair, though, I was identically awkward in my book ¿Por qué?, because I shoehorned a question about su into the “Pronouns” section of Chapter Nine, “Names, Nouns, and Pronouns.” (It was Question 78: “How can su mean ‘it ‘his,’ ‘her,’ ‘their,’ and your’?”) I remember thinking at the time that it didn’t fit — but I couldn’t come up with a better place.

Anyway, I appreciate the Times‘s listening to us Spanish lovers. As usual, they should check with an educated Spanish speaker — ¿perhaps a Spanish teacher? — first.