Thought this was fun overall. 62 across “Parisian boulevard” the answer is boulevard. Rue means street.
@Steph Fun fact: boulevard comes from the German bulwark. When a German architect was hired to rework Paris (1700s I think), the city was growing and they had to remove the old city walls. The architect decided that, instead of placing buildings where the walls were, he would make new wide roads. He referred to the former walls as bulwarks, and the French adapted the word to boulevards to refer to the new roads. In essence, it became the opposite of what it was.
@Wayne C They didn’t “have to” remove the city walls. They decided to. Paris was a very medieval city up to the Napoleonic period when they nearly completely demolished it. One of the most thorough intentional urban razing projects.
@Steph I would argue that boulevards, avenues, drives, lanes, etc. are all varieties of the generic “street” regardless whether the signage specifically indicates “street”. That’s my take anyway.
@Steph If the clue were simply "Boulevard", and the answer was STREET, would you have a problem? I wouldn't. So I think this is a perfectly reasonable clue.
Because of 12D I've been listening to that masterpiece of song writing. Paul Simon is an indisputable genius. I mention below that there are no rhymes in "America"--it's purely prose lyrics. And it made me nostalgic for America, the country. I would like to go out looking for it. I once loved it very deeply, but I haven't seen it in a while. I'm just afraid I won't find it, and maybe I should leave the memory in the past, undisturbed.
@Francis Or...I might find out it never existed to begin with.
@Francis The first time I visited the US, the bus took us on the New Jersey Turnpike. The poignant sting that came from seeing the sign still resonates. Since that time I took many trips to look for America and I always found it somewhere. I think it's probably still there, but now I'd be afraid to go and look...
@Francis When I hit that clue I told my spouse, "Hey! It's the crossword clue I've been preparing for my whole life!" The song hits tender, nostalgic spots even in less turbulent times; I felt an edge of new sadness, today.
Eritrea is based on GREEK, not Latin.
OOPSIE was a nice little extra diminutive in the puzzle - you use it when OOPS is just too big for your situation. More words should have diminutives! Like, say: STUDLING TRUTHETTE UTURNITO
@Cat Lady Margaret “OOPSIE, just gonna do a little UTURNITO here”
Welp, the people who complain about calling Odin the Norse God of war should be happy to see TYR today. And I wouldn't have known it, if not for those complaints, so thanks.
If the constructor had actually put MICROFOREST in the puzzle, I would have had to call the language copse.
Rolling down my window): Say Mac! Yeah you in the Jaguar, you're Ja Rule, right? I thought so. VIP written all over you. Wow that's some stud in your ear, and that pinky ring, that's definitely outa some vending machine! If that went down the drain (oopsie!) you could send me down after it! And I'd do it! And the moral would be, a la Aesop: Even a refugee from Eritrea can end up on top! You don't get it? That's a little acetic of you, Ja. I'm not from Eritrea, silly! I'm an Aztec from Laos, near Saginaw. Anyhooray, where are you going in that Jagitini of yours? To the REM concert at the NACL-NSFW Arena ["The Nack"], wow! Me, I'm going to see Lil Foo at Acu-Nit East, her latest rap album went double platinum gold, "TKOs Era Tour," have you heard it? I've played my copy so often it skips, right in the middle of "U Mad Ewe" when she's singing Gentle nudge in my ryr, run in u turn neckrub Moet shed a Tyr Well, Mr. Rule, please precede, I mean proceed. Don't stay out past your bedtime! It's good to see you (and it's good to be seen). (Later at a diner): Waiter! There's a grain of sand in my finger sandwich! What's that mean? "The eel's on Dr. House." --? Oh! The meal's on the house? Thanks! And thanks also for this knotty challenging grid, leaving us in need of a mental neckrub. Much enjoyed it. Cervezas on Dr. House!
@john ezra Hey, some of us on the west coast are only just solving. Fortunately I don’t look at comments until I’m done but still! Maybe schedule your clever comment for at least 9 am Pacific time!
@john ezra LIL FOO got quite a chuckle from me. Nice one!
@Ombeady I think the etiquette in this discussion section is just different from that of, say, the Spelling Bee. Pretty much figure on seeing answers revealed here any time, it's just the way this forum is used.
Vicious natick in the top left, MOET / MAC / ORE. Didn't know any of them and just guessed. Overall I did enjoy this one, and the theme clues are great, but a lot of the surrounding clues really tripped me up. ERITREA coming from Red Sea was hard for someone who knows the Latin words for read and sea but not a lot of proper nouns. And, looking it up, I like the clue even less. It comes most recently from Italian (mare eritreo) via the Latin "erythraeus" which is clearly a loanword from Greek and also not a phrase. Yes, the name itself emerged via Latin more recently than Greek, but the full phrase (mare erythreum) is not the full name for the country. I know this is pedantic but if I can't give into my worst pedantic impulses in the NYT crossword comments section, then where can I?
@IL I for one regularly cave to my worst instincts.
@IL Agreed. There were much better ways to clue MAC given that most people will be getting MOET from crossings. I've never heard that use of "mac" in my life.
Nice puzzle. Got any Thursdays though?
@Selective Walrus Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a tariff.
@Selective Walrus Ditto. Should the Thursday menu feature more chewy rebuses and obfuscating clues? Seems like some knickers get knotted around here every time there's a rebus, circle or animated grid. Me, I'm happy to be alive - just play 'em out as Will & Co. lay 'em out.
Thought I would get a start on tomorrow's puzzle, and I was so captivated I ended up doing the whole thing. Very clever! I didn't know JA RULE at all, so that was the last to fall. I also really enjoyed Deb's column...love her solving method tips! Hee hee. I've definitely employed "staring woefully;" maybe I will add in "sighing plaintively" in the future to help even more!
I was mentally composing a complaint about the injustice of crossing the name of a French holding company with a subdivision of a currency I knew nothing about when I realized that, somehow, I knew the answer. I had to look up the rapper, and even after I got the music ACUNIT had me staring at it baffled me for a while (yes, I did eventually figure it out). Running two words together always throws my pattern recognition for a loop. You'd think I'd watch for it, but no...it trips me up like Lucy holding the football, every time.
@Bruce I managed to solve correctly and even understood the theme by the end, but made sure to run a post-solve Google search on this strange new thing called an ACUNIT [facepalm, lol] :-D
@Bruce Skimming this comment, I homed in on ACUNIT, but somehow missed the "I" in it, and got briefly offended.
@Bruce I spent at least 2 minutes wondering what an “acunit” was
Late to the party, as I had to be on duty by 7:30 at the Big House for our fund-raiser (an indoor yard sale to end all yard sales.) Exhausting but lucrative, plus you can unload your excessive "Stuff", unfinished projects, outgrown clothes (cough cough), etc. We spend 3 days unpacking, sorting, pricing, arranging, and the 4th day we sell, sell, sell. The day ends with a massive load-up for the truck belonging to a charity. I usually try to score a few LARGE men's 100% cotton shirts; one can harvest a surprising amount of yardage from these a advantageous prices ($2 each.) Compare to $12/yard for quilting cotton.... Oh, the puzzle. I solved it while wolfing down a light breakfast.... It was missing the eensy weensy spider, but little else. The puzzles this week have seemed simpler IMHO. What was that line from the movie (?Sunset Blvd?)..."It was the movies that got small." If I try to catch 40 winks, would that be a NAPKIN?
Solved. Would have never gotten the theme without reading the blog.
Quick and fun! I sure do love Gmail's "Undo" button. Fun tip: did you know you can customize thr number of seconds it gives you to change your mind? I give myself a generous 15 seconds to have second thoughts. I use it far too much.
@Lpr now if only we could have an Undo for the Wordplay comments, when you realize someone made the exact same comment as you 5 comments back! 😁
“I don’t love that new hair color, but NEW DO HUE, honey.”
I really thought the letters missing from D _ _ A _ STATE were RED 😅
The theme... I got it in the end. I didn't find it particularly fun, and if it was witty at all then only witty-ish in a cringey dad-joke sort of way. The fill was mostly easy, but the area directly north defeated me - after staring at it for a long time I looked up the rapper and the football player. It didn't help that I had "wee" rather than LIL. ACUNIT confused me after crosses revealed it. I couldn't parse it for a while. Then I saw it was in fact an AC UNIT. Them dropping onto the pavement happens where you live? We've had AC UNITs in Poland for decades now, and I've never heard of a single case of one falling down. The threat of criminal liability for manslaughter rather strongly discourages AC installers from doing a bad job.
@Andrzej It’s not the unit itself that falls, they often drip water onto the sidewalk below.
@Andrzej Hah, I had the same pause as you. College football, yes; pro football, only by partial osmosis from my husband, so I just wasn’t seeing the JAGs. Also had wee instead of LIL, the rapper’s name looks very unEnglish, and ACUNIT is a DOOK. Took a bit of time for AC UNIT to drop, if you’ll pardon the pun. Once it did, though, like @Francis, I instantly had a mental image of an 80s Law & Order rerun, Brisco and Green standing over the poor squashed schmuck, wisecracking.
Enjoyable puzzle, and when I finally got the theme, it amused me. Probably the favorite was [Rockette?] The one that I'm not so sure about is 5D. It is true that vinegar is a solution of water and acetic acid, but the "acid" part of "acetic" is very important. What's the term the wordsmiths here came up with for this. "Too Close Syndrome"? Anyone else bothered by ACETIC?
@Francis - quite the contrary; the primary meaning of acetic is vinegary, from the Latin acetum = vinegar. Acetic acid is named for vinegar, not the other way around.
@Francis I sure had Acidic in there for a while until the crosses forced my hand.
@Francis. ACETIC is the adjective derived from the Latin “acetum” meaning vinegar, so it literally means [vinegary]
@Francis Vinegar isn’t just an acetic acid solution, though that’s what you often get sold in the store (and the source can be petroleum). It derives from plant material, traditionally wine in Europe, and so has other things in it that provide flavor.
This puzzle was spark-ling! Et tu, emu.
I adore “America” by Simon and Garfunkel, so I loved seeing that clue and instantly and excitedly sang the lyric out to my wife who was less enthused lol. This was clued a bit simply for a Thursday imo. I didn’t really get the theme clues until after I’d completed it. I don’t necessarily hold that against the puzzle/creator — it happen — but it does make me enjoy the puzzle a bit less.
@Logan I love that song, too. Fun fact: that song has no rhymes in it. I sometimes wonder if that's why it seems so surreal to me. And I just love the pathos that follows the playfulness: "I said 'Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera.'" "Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping." Paul Simon is a genius songwriter. His lyrics give me chills.
@Logan Yeah, that Saginaw line can be a real belter.
I've read all the comments and agree about RUE. I know I wouldn't want to be the American tourist asking a Parisian to point me to Les Grandes Rues instead of Les Grands Boulevards. As for the origin of ERITREA, I don't know either Greek nor Latin, so that misstep was lost on me. What was also lost on me, unfortunately, was the wordplay of the themers. I solved unaware, and only at the end did I go back and figure it out. My apologies, Mr. Wagner. To make up for it – and in honor of the theme as well as your childhood memories – here's the LIttLe River Band with "Reminiscing": <a href="https://youtu.be/XBETVhHpcPk?si=QMs-2kfwF3rdjeNa" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/XBETVhHpcPk?si=QMs-2kfwF3rdjeNa</a> And since you mentioned the FOO Fighters, here's something that always moves me. One thousand (!) Italian musicians got together to record a video of the Foo Fighters' song "Learn to Fly" as a plea to the band, that they would come play at the small Italian town of Cesena. The video went viral and David Grohl was so touched by the tribute that he packed up the band and held a concert in Cesena that same year. <a href="https://youtu.be/JozAmXo2bDE?si=2nFysMb_erPLczfz" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/JozAmXo2bDE?si=2nFysMb_erPLczfz</a> I've rewatched the video quite a few times since solving the puzzle last night. It restores my faith and gives me hope that there's strength in numbers, and that if we are individually just a LIL GRAIN OF SAND, collectively we become dunes that can and will be SEEN.
@sotto voce I’ve watched many Rockin1000 videos (but not that one), even have tshirt (a gift from my son), but I never knew their origin story. Thanks, Sotto!
Enjoyable puzzle, which I solved without the faintest clue why the theme answers related to clues, getting them only by seeing the word patterns once I had a few crosses. And I completed it faster than it would take me to hitchhike from Saginaw. Did a forehead slap when I read Wordplay and had the theme explained to me. Quite clever. I had detag instead of UNTAG and only got ACUNIT by the crosses, and even then it took me a minute to actually “get” it.
@Marshall Walthew I, too, wondered what an ACUNIT was and when I started typing it to look up when I was done, I realized that it was AC UNIT. Ah!
@Eddie -- I love your didness as usual posts.
@Lewis As an average cruciverbalist, I hope to be a bellwether or "Grant's Captain" if you will (a term I would love to see in the NYT CWP one day, as a clue or answer) as to the difficulty of the day's puzzle! On days when it is unsolvable, I will post accordingly!
When the 19th- and 20th-century scholars unpacked ancient scripts - hieroglyphs, runes, dead alphabets - they were bridging gaps of lost knowledge. Things once familiar, known, taken for granted, yet allowed to have passed out of use, after too many generations of people who didn’t care about what happened before they were born, or even before living memory… -ling is certainly on the list of things doomed to die. Only Tolkien fans have half a chance of saving it from complete obliteration. The -l- is indeed diminutive/endearing and the -ing is ergative. Mein Liebling = “my darling” in the same way that my darling = my dear-l-ing (my dear-l-ing = dear to me + diminutive + ergative “I actively endear you, sweetie”). That -l- diminutive is seen in Yiddish “shtetl” (little town), in Pennsylvania German “Hundli” (puppy/little dog), in German “Hansel” (Johnny / little Johannes). When English has utterly forgotten that it was born of Germanic stock, the language will indeed have been lost. -ling primarily connotes TNG : the next generation. The ancient Greeks used -ides to mean “the offspring/children/daughters/sons of…” And English used “-ling” the exact same way. Pleiades Thenglings
@David Connell "Only Tolkien fans have half a chance of saving it from complete obliteration." Would that be a chanceling?
@David Connell Thank you 😊
@David Connell In Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the local dialect (Doric) adds -ie to words to make a diminutive, used with children. So bookie, coatie, cupie , and so on. Possibly many languages have ways of doing this.
@David Connell Only Tolkien fans? In Star Wars, the children spotted for an affinity to the Force were called "younglings" in their early training period. Hmm, what's the VENN diagram for Star Wars/LOTR fandom?
Happy 23, Adam Wagner. Wow. An uncommon fast Thursday solve Out West. Although enjoyable, wondered about staying power for ALDI, JARULE and TIVO. Luckily, they're tucked in quite nicely with enough grist to get them through the archive mill in 2030 and beyond. Quick chuckle over the ACUNIT dripping on the urban sidewalk. Out here, we just run around in circles and spray our bare feet with the watering hose. If the house is warm, it'll keep cutworms and visitors away.
Done in by ALDI, again. Not the first time that store has gotten me. They just don’t exist in my neck of the woods. I had STUb for [ear piece]. Was thinking “corn”. I find making a comment here can help a lot with remembering for my next RUN IN. (ALDI, ALDI, ALDI) Fun puzzle - clever theme. Perhaps a bit easy for. Thursday but you won’t hear complain about that.
@Striker Apparently there are 108 ALDI stores in California. Who knew??
@Striker I know a German chain store in an American grid will always be ALDI, and it was today, too. We have those in Europe, obviously, but Lidl is my mind's first choice for 4 letter German supermarket - Lidl is probably the most ubiquitous store chain in Europe, and no wonder: their value for money is awesome. Also, every Lidl store has a similar layout, so shopping is as fast and easy for me in Warsaw, Palermo or Munich. However, despite the uniformity of layout, Lidl stocks local and regional products and produce. Cool stuff.
@Andrzej We have Aldis here in Aus, but no Lidls (at least AFAIK). But I still tried Lidl first for some reason!
About the article: attics themselves are vented to remove hot air, moisture, etc. and they also contain vents from house to roof to get rid of nasties such as gas or stove smoke. That is why they are great for ventilation. Other than tying this clue to the clever AC Unit entry, I don't see the connection.
I stopped after I had three theme answers filled in, determined to solve the theme. I love when a theme is stumping me, when I start thinking, “I’m going to figure you out and I’m not filling in any more until I do.” My brain lives for this. Today I finally saw those diminutive suffixes in the clues, cracked the theme, and felt good all over from that as well as from experiencing Adam’s wit. Funny moment was uncovering FINGERSAND and confidently turning it into FINGERS AND TOES. I appreciate Adam's skill in coming up with these theme answers, which are filled with spark, as three of them are NYT answer debuts, and the other two are once-befores. Four of them – all except VENDING MACHINE – truly shine. I also smiled at the cross of OOPSIE and a backward OOF. Just a splendid Thursday, with plenty of rub to happify my brain, topped by that sweet theme-crack. Thank you greatly for this, Adam.
A GENTLENUDGE is a shove-ling. Like a duck-ling is a little duck. A VENDINGMACHINE is a mart-ini. Like bambini are little children. (OK, we seem to have a singular/plural issue here, since it's not VENDINGMACHINES.) A PINKYRING is a band-ito. Like a gatito is a little cat or kitten. A FINGERSANDWICH is a sub-let. Like a starlet is a little star, e.g., an up-and-coming actress. A GRAINOFSAND is a rock-ette. Like a statuette is a small statue. OK, the theme and themers generally make sense. And the fill in general is quite solid. But somehow I didn't really enjoy this one. Probably because I was hoping for Thursday trickery, and this is simply a nice Wednesday puzzle. Solved it easily enough, but no feeling of HOORAY!
@Xword Junkie Well said. Whenever you can blow through a puzzle and it doesn’t matter at all that you have no idea what the theme concept is can feel a bit unsatisfying. That said, it IS a clever theme!
@Xword Junkie I guess I get the theme after reading the column but it just seems a little lame. If they’d ditched the theme and come up with normal but clever clues for the answers, this would have been a perfectly nice Wednesday puzzle.
Yet again, it's entirely possible to solve the puzzle without ever "getting" the theme.
@Pua Iki We know what "iki" means, LOL I don't know PUA. Could you translate? (As long as it's not kapu.)
Good puzzle, if not as hard as a typical Thursday for me. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to understand ACUNIT was not new word I haven't heard, but an AC UNIT. Lol
@Jones that one really stumped me, too. And I live in NY so I should have known!
Never got the theme, but it was easy enough to fill out the whole puzzle without it.
I finished but had to look here to understand. Too cute by half.
Almost set a PB, but never once got the theme. Even after reading and understanding it, I couldn’t help but think “oh, is that it…” boring. Decent puzzle, poor theme.
Anyone else have fun with this up until the recently news-making OOPSIE? Another joy undercut by a reminder of unserious people doing serious harm… Sorry for the digression, apart from that a delightful puzzle, even if the Greeks named Eritrea before the “Latins”.
@Marks I always wondered what "reading between the lines" meant. I think I get it now.
Fwiw, I liked the theme. It was clever and fun. Good puzzle!
I got it, but i really didn't get it.
Did anyone else incorrectly enter "RED" for 39A? (This was purely unconscious; I don't think of myself as that closed minded.)
@Brian I almost did, but then I thought, 'that's not very nice.' I am Canadian, after all.
@Brian I did. And it was conscious. I'm not sure why, given the temper of these days, that DREAdSTATE is any more or less closed minded than DREAMSTATE.
I like the theme, but 4A/4D was a Natick for me, as was 14A/3D.
@Elizabeth L I did wonder if those particular ones would be challenging for other solvers. I figured I knew CERVEZA from high school Spanish class, but on second thought, I doubt they taught us that word. So I guess I knew it from drinking a lot of Corona "La cerveza mas fina" and Modelo Negra back in the day. So I sussed ORE from the crosses. I didn't know MOET was the first part of that company name, but really what other luxury company name starts with M and shows up in crosswords a lot? And somehow or other, JA RULE popped into my head (or it was in there already and rose to the surface) after a few crossing entries. So I got JAG from the crosses too. But if I hadn't known the rapper's name, I'd have had to run the alphabet at the end.
@Elizabeth L I used to watch The Good Place so I knew Jacksonville was the Jaguars because of Jason Mendoza's obsession with them, but I had no clue whatsoever about the rapper. The AC UNIT in that section also tripped me up; I was parsing it as maybe some kind of nut they have in NYC that I'm unfamiliar with. (My first thought was bird poop but I couldn't see a way to make it fit.)
@Elizabeth L Same! Cute theme, and some fun fills (nice to see desi and Dr. House and I now have 'America' playing on a loop in my head :)). But that NW corner was brutal for me. i didn't know CERVEZA, or ORE or MOET and was stuck because I had pal instead of MAC for the longest time. Annoying end to an otherwise fun puzzle!
@Elizabeth L A "natick" is when the square could literally be any letter of the alphabet, such as a name starting with an initial -- which was the initial use of the term, when the town of NATICK crossed with the artist NC WYETH. 14A/3D cannot be a "natick" because here the square at the cross has to be a vowel: 5 possibilities, not 26. I have to say, as another New Yorker, I'm surprised you didn't know the Spanish word for beer! (I'd also venture to say 4A/D isn't a true "natick" either, since a little logic dictates what the Jacksonville team would be, especially if you had _AG... That said, this was 100% the most difficult section of the puzzle for me!)
As a native Italian speaker, 40 down did confuse me. The closest I could come up with in Latin for Red Sea was something like "Marrosso" and thought it could have been Morocco for the answer (which wouldn't have made any sense given its geographical position). I believe Eritrea must be the Greek name for it?
@Devid Yes, from erythros—red. The same root as in erythrocytes, your red blood cells.
@Devid I went down that hole for a bit, then realized the name was probably not a literal translation of red and sea, but the Latin name for the feature. Wiki says: "The name Eritrea is derived from the ancient (originally Greek) name for the Red Sea, the Erythraean Sea (Ἐρυθρὰ Θάλασσα Erythra Thalassa, based on the adjective ἐρυθρός erythros "red")." Maybe the Romans adopted the original Greek name? I'm sure someone will weigh in on this.
@Devid I was confused too. The latin phrase for "red sea", as asked in the clue, is Mare Rubrum because they translated the greek Erythra thalassa. The latinised word existed but it was the land around it, not the sea. I deduced the country by thinking of which one is around the sea and has an "antic" name, but it's a badly written clue.
You know it's a complicated theme when you solve it but still have to come here to learn what those longer clues even mean.
RE: constructor comments. Groveling is a great word and fitting for the times. Amazing puzzle. I got the theme with GRAINOFSAND, which allowed me to work out the centre with PINKYRING. One nit. A Parisian boulevard is a boulevard. Not really a rue.
@Esmerelda The editors will RUE that clue one day.
Got stuck in the upper middle. Had ACIDIC and JAYZEE for the longest time, and was trying to make GIVEAWEENUDGE work. Eventually figured it out!
43 across is why turning on the "undo send" option in Gmail (mine is set for 5 seconds) has saved me lots of embarrassment over the years. Maybe we can have that option too when we hit "submit" here?
A gentle nudge being just a “SHOVE-ling” was cool to me.
I pulled 4 Across out of my, um, hat. Yeah, hat!