NYT Connections April 5, 2025 #664 Hints & Answers

The word 'employ' comes from the Old French 'emploier,' which itself derives from Latin 'implicare,' meaning 'to involve.' This etymology reveals how employment has long been conceptualized as an act of involving someone in your affairs or business. The formal employment contract as we know it today only became standardized in the 19th century with industrialization, though arrangements for labor have existed since ancient civilizations.

The concept of website headers and sidebars evolved from traditional print design principles. Early websites in the 1990s were extremely basic, often just text with simple hyperlinks. The standardization of these structural elements—headers, sidebars, menus—emerged around 1996-1998 with the rise of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which allowed designers to control layout separately from content. Before responsive design became standard in the 2010s, websites typically had fixed-width layouts optimized for desktop viewing, making these structural elements much more rigid than the fluid designs common today.

TIME magazine, founded in 1923, pioneered the concept of the 'Person of the Year' (originally 'Man of the Year') in 1927, featuring aviator Charles Lindbergh on the cover after his historic transatlantic flight. The magazine's iconic red border was introduced in 1927 and has remained a consistent element of its visual identity for nearly a century. While many print magazines have struggled in the digital era, TIME maintains a global circulation of over 2 million, though this is significantly down from its peak of over 4 million subscribers in the 1990s.

The word 'lance' has particularly interesting origins, coming from the Latin 'lancea,' which may have been borrowed from a non-Indo-European language. The medieval lance evolved significantly over time, reaching its most iconic form during the 12th-15th centuries when it became the primary weapon of heavy cavalry. Knights would use a specialized technique called 'couching' where they tucked the lance under their arm and used the weight and momentum of both horse and rider to deliver devastating impacts. Special saddles with high backs were developed specifically to prevent riders from being unhorsed by the force of their own lance strikes during jousting tournaments.