![]() If you solve the early-week puzzles but feel as if you don’t have the experience to go any further, think of the newsletter as a set of cruciverbal training wheels. This extra bit of goodness is for those who would like to try the Friday puzzles but have heard all about how hard they are. Don’t Fear the Fridays: About the Easy Mode NewsletterĬhristina Iverson, a puzzle editor, will send a weekly Friday puzzle with more accessible crossword clues right to your inbox, if you sign up for the Easy Mode newsletter. 3 is my birthday, so I’ll use this space to say “Hi, Mom!” and thanks to you all for solving! Seeing this puzzle in print today (it was originally submitted April 2022) is a nice present. And luckily, TAKE FIVE presented itself as a handy reveal to help explain what’s going on. I found fewer strong candidates for this theme than anticipated, and fit what I could on the grid. I found that if either part is too short or too long, the result tends to feel less transformed and thus less fun, but adding five letters to an unrelated six- or seven-letter word yielded the most unexpected results. It’s also more surprising when the “borrowed” letters are meaningless on their own (e.g., INDIG from SHINDIG), or unrelated to their context (e.g., TRAPS from STRAPS). ![]() In order for it to be fodder for a puzzle, there needs to be as much surprise as possible: The parts should all change their meanings entirely, so a solver doesn’t see it coming too easily. They are apparitions, and in this puzzle, they are GENII, the plural of “genie.” Constructor NotesĪdding letters to the front of words isn’t inherently theme-worthy, because it’s so common in English. The spirits in “Some spirits” do not refer to alcohol in this puzzle. Anyway, the word for “crossword puzzle” in ESPERANTO is “krucvortenigmo,” which probably explains a lot about why the language never caught on.ģ4D. The arguments for (offered by the teachers) and against it (from the parents) seemed to come and go around the same time our teachers were frantically looking for materials to teach us something called the metric system, which also mysteriously disappeared from our young lives. When I was in grade school, I can remember our teachers talking at various times about us children having to learn a universal language called ESPERANTO. The name of the music mecca of the songwriting business in the early 20th century was taken from a “Rickety piano, in old music biz slang” called a TIN PAN, so named because its sound was reminiscent of tin pans clacking together.ġ0D. Everyone is familiar with Tin Pan Alley, right? If you are not, it was “that little section of 28th Street, Manhattan, that lies between Broadway and Sixth Avenue,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. ![]() I love learning new things from crossword puzzles. I don’t recall ever hearing it, but maybe it’s a regional thing.ġ7A. ![]() The phrase CUT NO ICE, clued today as “Carry zero weight, idiomatically,” last appeared in the New York Times Crossword in 1985. ![]() The answer is really ASSIGNOR, a person who transfers the rights of a contract to an assignee, or receiver, which for all I know is spelled “receivor.”ġ6A. Every time I came back to that section, I would type “co,” which would be marked incorrect, and I would wander off to another spot. I’m not sure what this disorder is called, but my brain convinced me that the answer to the clue, “Counterpart to a receiver, legally” was “co-signor,” which may not even be a thing (most of the dictionaries I checked spelled it “co-signer”), plus it had the added disadvantage of being completely and totally wrong. Seigel has turned the phrase TAKE FIVE into a hint about how to solve those theme entries. But if you count back five letters from the end of 37A’s FOREVER and read from left to right (cha-cha-cha!), you will wind up with REVERBERATES.įortunately for us, there is a very clever and instructional revealer at 63A. Similarly, the answer to 39A’s “Echoes” is BERATES, which does not make a whole lot of sense, unless you are berating very loudly. ![]()
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