Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper , by Ben Zimmer, wildly difficult. Daily puzzles — Newsday , the Los Angeles Times , the syndicated New York Times — seem to me increasingly easy. I can often do an entire puzzle, or nearly an entire puzzle, from Across clues alone. But the Saturday Stumper seems to get more and more difficult and unfun. Humph. Some clue-and-answer pairs of note: 1-A, five…