I got better at Scrabble after tile and error. (At first, I was drawing a blank.)
@Mike It's magic. All you need are the right spells
@Mike There were Qs all around, but I never heard them clinking tile there was U.
@Mike You just have to rack your brain a bit.
@Mike I don’t know what to say. I have no words. 🍁☮️
What's with the horrific new cursor feature?
@Twangster Oh, it's not just me? Good. I guess.
@Twangster Maybe it was something they had to do to make the very last word across work?
@Twangster does it look like a Scrabble tile? That's what I thought
@Twangster To the people suggesting it's part of the theme, it's on the Mini and Midi too
@Twangster at the very least should be behind a setting that we can disable. Terrible feature.
@Twangster It was there yesterday, too, and several of us commented on it. It seems to appear a bit different for different people, but it's annoying however it occurs. Maybe some day someone will figure out that they ought to un-break it... I suspect we'll be living with it for a while, though. These are the people who took away some of the Sunday extra puzzles a few years ago because they were "technically too difficult" to keep doing -- even though some were pdfs.
@Twangster Please make it stop! I can't see the whole letter and it's driving me nuts.
@Twangster Yeah, it is HORRIBLE UX and clearly was not properly vetted on various browsers/platforms. Weirdly (and thankfully), DuckDuckGo on Mac does not show the new highlight, but it is there on the other browsers I checked. If my team pushed code that bad to production, there would be heck to pay!
@Twangster What are you all talking about? Looks the same to me (MacBook Air (Tahoe 26.6.2) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
@Twangster Glad it's not just me. As soon as I try to type in a letter it shoots me to the top of the page and I can't see the grid anymore. Ruins the enjoyment of filling out a puzzle.
@Twangster I'm not having any trouble. Mine works like normal on my iPad
I love when I open a puzzle, and upon first glance, I can tell the grid is unusual and I’m about to have a good time. I enjoyed all of the scrabble love, but my favorite clue was “hamburger connection?” So witty! I thought the last across clue could have been clued “most powerful” rather than “most valuable” since blanks are worth zero points, but it was all good fun!
@Matt Agree, this was an enjoyable puzzle and really appreciate your positive comments about it!
@Matt I agree that "most valuable" was confusing.
@Matt I think valuable was a slight misdirection, because my thoughts first went to Q and Z. A welcomed misdirection in an otherwise easy puzzle, to me. The clue didn't say most points. Value isn't always numerical.
@Matt Yeah. But obviously 'blank' and 'blank' from the crosses. I rebused 'em in there.
Fun Fact: Alfred Butts also designed one other game. Do you know what it was called? “Alfred’s Other Game” (Yes, seriously).
@Selective Walrus No clue! Here's a link <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3509/alfreds-other-game" target="_blank">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3509/alfreds-other-game</a>
I knew EIDETIC because long ago I read a thriller with a hero who had a photographic memory. A few years later I read a few chapters of it before I realized I'd read this book before. True story.
@ad absurdum I use Goodreads to keep track of what I've read. Every once in a while I think Hmm, this plot sounds familiar 🤔
@ad absurdum I think it's good to read books twice. Otherwise, really, how much do you really remember about them? Same with movies.
A Tuesday Thursday. Not surprising following what others have described as three Mondays. Oh well; there should be lots of "Fastest Thursday ever" posts. Nice grid, Jeff, but the clues...
@Barry Ancona Yep. 6:30 when my Thursday average is 17:38. It did feel like a Tuesday.
I really enjoyed this. Lots of fun. I’m sure the hate will come. But I liked it
@Alexia Please don’t mistake legitimate criticism or disappointment for “hate”. I doubt very many folks here on either side of the crossword aisle, such as it is, will “hate” this puzzle. Just because they think it should have been earlier in the week, spiced up by a trickier theme, or at least clued at a higher level doesn’t mean that they hate it. I sure was disappointed that this took up a Thursday slot that I would like to be reserved for more of a challenge or twist and ought to be able to say so; but I certainly didn’t hate it.
Number one rule at the crossword club: Any rule can be broken in the service of a theme.
@Steve L …if the theme is worthy enough to warrant it. YMMV.
@Steve L My first thought when I saw 1A was that Will was taking a cue from the cue administration, that rules are meant to be broken.
Disappointingly straightforward for a Thursday, with only a couple of two letter entries including two fairly obvious rebuses qualifying as quirks or gimmicks. Nevertheless I appreciated the Scrabble theme. Both my maternal grandmother and mother were avid (and skilled) Scrabble players, and I fondly remember summer vacations at my grandparents’ house near Lockport, NY and the fiercely contested games the three of us would have. Despite having only a high school education (and a one room school at that) my grandmother was a killer player. I can’t remember either my mother or me ever beating her, although I came close once or twice. Seemingly whenever anyone seemed poised to beat her, my grandmother would come up with some arcane word that magically managed to land on enough bonus squares to put the game out of reach. My mother remained a good player into her nineties, and would take on anyone willing to challenge her at her retirement community, and she rarely lost. We played at least once a week up until the week before she passed. My daughter enjoys Scrabble too, although she doesn’t get much chance to play. I’m hoping my grandson continues the tradition, but I fear his gaming interests will lie in a different area.
@Marshall Walthew, I didn't note any rebuses, Marshall, but it sounds like your family took their Scrabble as a core pastime as did mine. Like you the easy clues struck me as a letdown. Kept waiting for something to happen to make me bang my head against the wall, but nothing ever did.
PB Thursday. But I don’t want PBs. From Thursday through Saturday I want suffering! I want pain!
@Hugh try the rest of the paper!
Highlights for me were the moment I realized EIDETIC, a word I’ve never heard of, was actually correct, and the lovely two-blank surprise ending. I did check out some other Scrabble themed crosswords, and loved one by Nancy Salomon that was in the New York Sun in 2008. The revealer, SCRABBLE, was at 61-across. My two favorite clue/answers were: [Basic necessities for a game of 61-across] for ROOM AND BOARD. [Lucky thing in 61-across] for DRAWING A BLANK. Today there were a couple of lovely serendipities – the rare-in-crosswords five letter palindrome (SOLOS), and the cross of CLEFT and CLEAT. Thanks for reminding me of an adored pastime of mine, Jeff, and teaching me a bit of its history. Combining the two wordplay activities hit my happy button!
@Lewis Could it be that perhaps you've seen the word EIDETIC and simply don't remember?
this one is going in the crossword hall of fame - Scrabble is a a crossword puzzle without clues - making this into a crossword is genius. bravo!
If the new letter outline/cursor thing is going to be permanent, PLEASE at least make it so we can toggle it off! It's terribly distracting and actively covers the letters on either side.
"a step is the interval between two sequential notes" Sorry Sean, but the interval between two chromatic notes is a half step. Even if we look at the major scale, it's a half step from mi to fa and from ti to do.
@Jeff - Agreed. Neighboring tones in the western scales can generally be either half or whole steps apart. That's why the constructor didn't specify the size of the step in STEPWISE.
@Jeff I don’t understand your critique here. Both half steps and whole steps are steps, so… what’s your point? 🤔
@Jeff I had the same thought, so I looked it up: "Stepwise motion (also called conjunct motion) is melodic movement between adjacent scale degrees, moving by half or whole step." So it's following a chosen scale without skipping a degree, regardless of whether that degree is a whole step or half step. Confusingly named, for sure.
@Jeff this clue rankled me as well.
Loved this one. And it clicked for me - very fast time for me for a Thursday. Plus I learned a new word (EIDETIC). And thanks for not making us type in “blank” or “b” to get the completion star. Would’ve ruined the aesthetic. My grandmother used to cheat at Scrabble by flipping over a tile and using it as a blank. She’d only get discovered when the real second blank turned up, but she’d feign innocence (“I was just seeing what I could make if I had a blank, and then I forgot!”).
@Classic Hip-Hop Fan I put blank as a rebus in the 2 cells and it also completed that way. I guess a b would have worked as well but that would have been very unsatisfying!
@Classic Hip-Hop Fan The story about your grandmother was an extra topping on my ‘ZA. Thanks.
Kept waiting for the rebus. Love Scrabble, did not know the inventors name so there’s a nice TIL. Thought the blanks were cute. Not a difficult Thursday but nicely enjoyable.
@Helen Wright I’m glad they programmed it to allow empty, a space, or rebus “BLANK” for those tiles, because each solver would think of different ways to enter it. This is the first Thursday I’ve solved without having to look something up, so I guess it was easier than normal. I had no idea who made Scrabble, so when I got “BUTTS”, i was rather skeptical!
The new (red, thicker) active square highlighting interferes with seeing the characters as you enter them. I hope you'll go back to the previous/regular cell highlighting.
Favorite clue: Hamburger connection?
Wow! A reverse rebus! I had LEFT OUT and WENT UP, but I didn’t get the happy gold star. Then I took those two rebuses out of the last two squares, and there it was. I never got the success signal for taking out letters before today! Cool!
@Dave S. When I realized early that leaving the last two squares empty would probably work I figured there would be some surprise ending comments like yours. ! Fun!
It’s like having two of your favourite TV shows collab, I liked this puzzle.
Thursday crossword bliss - thanks Jeff & Will and editors this is one is for the ages. absolutely brilliant puzzle!
A Thursday puzzle with a theme about Scrabble, an easy rebus, nary a Spanish word nor a Simpsons clue, fun wordplay, new-to-me words (HOARY?! Made me laugh!), fun clues (24D), and some Scottish fun? Count me in! Didn’t get my personal best, but I certainly did much better than I typically do on a Thursday! Very fun puzzle, despite its ease!
Growing up playing Scrabble in the evenings with my family, I enjoyed this puzzle a lot as a homage to our favorite game, played probably a thousand times over 50+ years (my highest score in a 2-person game: 544, a quantum leap over my second highest score). For a kid, watching my brother and sister and parents fiddle around with their letters for minutes upon minutes, what it taught, beyond vocabulary, was patience, which is not just waiting, but finding ways to occupy my restless mind while waiting my turn. Also, in our family, if you put down a word you'd have to have some inkling as to its definition if you were challenged, so we learned not only to spell, but what odd words meant; and if we didn't know, the rule was we could look up the word in M-W (always sitting stolidly in its own place on the table), but only use it in subsequent games. It made it a little more challenging, for me anyway. It's a feat to use all 100 tiles like Jeff did, with the requisite number of each letter, and to include the blanks, appropriately clued, at the bottom, and I like the broken rule of a two-letter entry at the top. My friend Stan has memorized all the 2-letter words important as glue and point-getters in Scrabble. But Stan had better know what QI means if he's gonna play with my ma* The easy cluing of this puzzle was off-putting. Thursdays should be harder. But why beat a dead Belmont colt? *Stan does know OD is the odic life force proposed by Reichenbach in the 1840s, AS DO I
I know there are a lot more than 100 tiles here, but the distribution of letters seemed right, like there are 21 E's by my count; in Scrabble, the most common letter is E, 12 of them, so 12 percent are E's. In this grid, with 181 open squares (44 are black), E's count for 11.6% of the fill. That's pretty close!
@john ezra I think you are stretching things. If the distribution is close it’s probably because the Scrabble distribution is meant to match the normal distribution of letters in words. And there’s no J or Q. So sure, a cute puzzle and a nice call out to Scrabble which we all love; but not nearly a worthy Thursday no matter how you slice it in my opinion. It’s just disappointing because there have got to be worthy Thursdays that the editors aren’t taking, or working with constructors to get some up to that level if not.
So, I said on Tuesday I wasn’t wild about pure tribute puzzles. I really really really don’t care for them on Thursdays. Yeah, maybe there was a little twist at the end but in my opinion too little too late. And as early returns seem to validate, not even a grid or clues that allow for any pushback. I’ll admit I got hung up for just a moment with TREAD before CLEAT, ATPTOUR before WTA, and SAILS before MAILS but other than that it was about as straightforward as possible. C’mon, please guys, you’ve got to give us something more. Anyway, I did post a new Crosshare puzzle today if you still have time on your hands. It’s definitely on the lighter side, more a Wednesday level, but hope it will put a smile on your face. <a href="https://crosshare.org/crosswords/XguFVoC0I5CwsEB7Nd36/stock-exchange" target="_blank">https://crosshare.org/crosswords/XguFVoC0I5CwsEB7Nd36/stock-exchange</a>
@SP When was the last time we agreed to such a huge extent as today? 🤜🏾🤛🏾 I'll try your puzzle later - it sounds like I might be able to complete it for once 😃
@SP I enjoyed your puzzle however it stretched me as do all your puzzles. Today's Scrabble tribute stretched me some also. I seem to be a bit out of step.🙃
@SP I entered TREAD with confidence... And later, I didn't think as I entered LEACH at 7A (nearing the end of my solve)...though 9D quickly disabused me of that idea. Duh.
@SP Your puzzle defeated me yet again. I was able to type in 15 entries or so, and that's it. I have no idea what the theme might be. I don't get most of the clues. For once though I actually knew some of the trivia! (Of which there again was way too much for my tastes) I think I really have to stop attempting to solve your grids. They are way above my pay grade.
@SP So much fun! Compared to today's NYT your CrossHare puzzle is easily a Saturday. (Which, these days... sigh.) I loved that I didn't entirely grasp how interlocked the theme clues were until I saw the dogs fly. Got me a smile. The Gigi clue was remarkably good, such a fresh take on theater cluing AND hiding letter based answers. The genus corner was cheeky. The baseballs clue stumped me for a bit and was satisfying to resolve. And it was nice to see nets used for something besides earnings for a change. Even the blindfold clue held me up, pleasingly. All around a fine puzzle that the Times should have jumped at.
If you play the UK version of Scrabble, then 1-across could be ZA, ZE or ZO.
@Menc what “slang for an Italian dish” are those others in the UK?
@Menc What do ZE and ZO mean? And why does the UK have a separate version of Scrabble? Last time I looked, we all use the same alphabet.
Loved this one! Even though I didn’t *know* a lot of the answers, the general patterns of the grid helped me figure them out.
@PK I thought Thursdays were supposed to be themeless.
If one is going to break the first cardinal rule of puzzlemaking -- i.e. thou shalt not have any two-letter words -- it better be for a really, really good reason or the NYTXW won't publish it. Right? So I was waiting for an exceptionally clever puzzle and this certainly didn't seem to be it. A Scrabble tribute puzzle -- yawn -- with unexceptional fill and unexceptional clues. But then came the blanks and the belated payoff. Quite cute. I feel sorry for anyone who's never played Scrabble and who doesn't know what blank tiles are. You won't have any payoff, belated or not. And without a payoff, this would be one of the most unThursdayish Thursdays ever. Come to think of it, it's pretty unThursdayish even with a cute payoff. My tiny second or two of amusement and appreciation at the end didn't compensate for a puzzle I found pretty flat throughout. I'm betting the constructor felt a real sense of excitement when the blank tiles idea first occurred to him and I wish he could have better sprinkled that excitement around the entire grid.
@Nancy I am amazed that, at this moment, 3 have recommended your comment. I found it snobbish. I enjoyed the puzzle! I will admit that I am not the connoisseur of NYT Thursday puzzles that some may be, but I know a haughty attitude when I read it.
@Nancy I couldn't agree more. It feels as if you wrote my comment for me. It's not snobbish to find a puzzle seriously wanting!
My late aunt and I would play Scrabble often and she would always beat me by a considerable amount. How she managed to always pull the "J", the "Q", and the "Z" tiles always mystified me! Shortly before she passed away, we played our last game, with her grandchildren as observers. I managed to pull the "Z" tile and formed the word "zit". She claimed that "zit" was not a word, much to the chagrin of the kids, who kept saying, "But it is a word!" Finally, she had one of the kids get her Scrabble dictionary, the copyright date of which was 1948!! Needless to say, "zit" wasn't in the dictionary! On another topic, 42-Across came to me as I was watching a "Big Bang Theory" rerun, when Sheldon mentioned that he had that kind of memory!
Awesome Tuesday puzzle!
@Captain Quahog bingo! Rather simple and underwhelming for a Thursday.
Does Sean also write the captions for the images that go with the Wordplay column? Today's is pretty good.
@J.S. Maybe I’m tired, or maybe just not clever this a.m., but I don’t get it!
I have many, many questions: Whose brilliant idea was it to have a thick line around the active square that partially blocks the letters above and below? AND that you can turn off in settings? A highlighted square wasn't enough???? Who asked for this?
@Kincaid - Interesting. My active square is only yellow. No extra border. The active square is yellow and the active word is blue. If you have an obnoxious border you can turn off, then do so. And contact the puzzle tecnical people as usually listed at the top of the comments.
@Kincaid I am having that same issue and I noticed from yesterday that other people are also. I'm doing it in a browser on my Android tablet. I wonder if it's somehow device related , but it was never a problem before.
@Art I solve on the NYT Games app on my Samsung Galaxy. This did not happen to me when solving last night. Is this something happening to people not solving in the Games app?
@Kincaid okay, I just figured out that it happens to me when I use my Opera browser , but it does not happen on my Firefox browser. Don't know what that's about.
@Kincaid This happened to me this morning too. It's absolutely terrible. An E square fully looked like an F because the bottom was cut off. I had to switch to my phone to finish the puzzle.
@Kincaid at alia Guess what I am thinking....?
@Kincaid I'm not seeing any of that stuff. Makes me very thankful to be solving in a mobile Firefox variant. Bold and yellow highlighting? What the h. That is NOT the NYT experience to date.
Wasted Thursday. Obviously the subject is near and dear for many here, and the puzzle rests a little too heavily on that alone IMO.
@M - Occasionally we solvers come across a puzzle with a theme that we are not interested in. So we can try and solve it, or just skip it.
Well, I won't HISS or GROWL, but this was much too easy and barely Thursday-esque at all thematically. Finished in 10 minutes. Getting to leave the two squares in the SE empty (BLANK) was cute, but I'd like more from a NYT Thursday puzzle. This could have run on a Wednesday for sure. EIDETIC is a nice word.
ALFRED is almost as well known as his filmmaker brother, Seymour, who worked in the adult film industry.
@Captain Quahog I always thought Seymour was a proctologist.
I gotta ask since I've been behind on the puzzle, what's up with the extra thick black outline around the square I'm typing in? It's blocking the other letters around it which is frustrating. Can I remove it?
@Daisy It's American productivity. The NYT doesn't need to add more journalists, they need more people on the backend ruining something that worked perfectly fine with an update!
I took two years of German a thousand years ago in highschool so UND was a gimme. But I mostly came here to say those two BLANKs (and rebuses at that!!!) were the icing on the cake. Well done Jeff!
Now I’m wondering… How many times I miss out the FIFTY POINT bonus because I didn’t know the word EIDETIC?
@Mike R Would have to be the very first word played. (And would be extremely impressive.)
Whew, tough puzzle. But satisfying. Also, took me 46m unaided, so not as tough as some others have been for me. I used rebuses for the blanks, so I didn't know you could leave them blank.
Finished the puzzle and left it on the table. DW comes downstairs and sez, "But you did not finish" whereupon I sez, "Read the down clues". Laughter ensues. Can't wait to use EIDETIC in a sentence. Up to my ears in campaigning and I've been doing the puzzles daily but no time to comment. Took a break today, hence this.
I grew up in NJ where my pizza came from local pizzerias called Frank's, DiMaios, Luigi's, etc. Went away to college in Provo, UT where the "in" crowd referred to it as ZA, which bothered me almost as much as the pizza in that city, most of which was produced by Dominos 🤮. It wasn't until many years later as I came to enjoy a good game of Scrabble with family and friends that I gradually began to accept the words ZA and QI, but only during a game. I live in FL now where I have been able to find "acceptable" pizza, but every Friday night I make the dough, and every Saturday I create my pizza, which is often followed by a round of Scrabble
Ok, can someone explain to me this? We have "gifter" and "giftee", "sender" and "sendee", "trainer" and "trainee", etc. Different entities. So are "escaper" and "escapee" the same entity? From the pattern, it seems that the one escaping should be the "escaper", and maybe the prison and its staff is the "escapee"? I never had to think about this before I had to correct 3D. Now it feels kind of wrong, somehow.
@Francis How about attender and attendee?
@Francis, I had the same pause. A donor gives, a donee receives; the double E seems a standard formulation for an object or recipient of an action and not the actor. Thus, employee, payee, addressee, trustee (one who is trusted), nominee, appointee, honoree, awardee, trainee, examinee, interviewee, draftee, inductee, detainee, internee, deportee, evacuee, abductee, parolee, invitee, franchisee. These are all part of an Anglo-French root going back to -é as the French ending (donné, "given") signifying something done TO an object. Used a lot in legalese. Later uses, such as escapee, seem to be corruptions of that principle.
@Francis I’m dismayed that “gift”’s ugly migration to verb status now seems to have produced the abominations “gifter” and “giftee”. Long live “give,” “giver,” and “recipient.” Mark
@Francis I see your point. Maybe escaper is one in the process of escaping, escapee has accomplished it. Or should that be escaped? The escaped lived in Bolivia. I sure can't think of a similar word that ends in EE that isn't a recipient of some sort. Then there are the words that come straight from French: soirée, fiancée. Escapee in French could be fugitif(ive) or interestingly évadé or évadée. Évadée would only refer to a female escapee. (Same with fiancée, only for a woman. A man would be fiancé.)
@Francis Straightforward reasoning - an escaper is one who has performed the act of escaping. An escapee has escaped a place. These seem different to me.
Having 42-across so prominent in the center is appropriate because some say it describes the memory of the world’s best scrabble player, Nigel Richards. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zfH2Jwuf3sM&t=380s&pp=2AH8ApACAQ" target="_blank">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zfH2Jwuf3sM&t=380s&pp=2AH8ApACAQ</a>%3D%3D&ra=m He has won championships in English, French, and Spanish even though he doesn’t speak French or Spanish. He just has all of the scrabble word lists memorized.
@Doctatonic I find this datum depressing. Does he even enjoy the game? What is the point of – I won't say 'playing' but let's say executing a game? A more arid occupation I can't imagine.
Second tribute puzzle within three days? I've never played scrabble, I know nothing about its history and I'm not familiar with its rules, so the theme did nothing for me, and I had to solve around it rather than using it. Still, I completed the grid in Wednesday time, which probably means many Americans must have found it as easy as a Monday or a Tuesday. The concept of leaving two squares blank was quite interesting. It confused me at first given my lack of familiarity with Scrabble, but then crosses served me the solution on a silver platter, which was a bit of a letdown on Thursday - I have always thought Thursdays should be impossible to get if you don't *really* understand the theme. What on Earth is ZA (or qi, for that matter)? I find it intriguing when it turns out I don't know some English words - and I don't mean slang, which naturally is often very hard for me to get. Today there were two such words, and they crossed, too, for an additional level of difficulty: HOARY and CLEAT. I've seen the term hoarfrost, which I suppose is related to HOARY, but apparently I never stopped to think what the "hoar" part might mean. I also kind of know CLEAT: as in, I've seen or heard the word, but again, I have obviously never learned what it denoted. The area directly North in the puzzle eluded me the longest because both these words were there.
@Andrzej Za in this sense is a slangy term for pizza, and Qi is the traditional Chinese concept of the life force that flows through all living beings :)
@Andrzej Cleats are bumps or spikes that can dig in a bit. In the US, we would most commonly use the term to describe soccer cleats. If you Google the term and look at pictures you'll see what they look like. Those shoes can be called either soccer cleats or just cleats. Now I've said the word cleat in my head so many times that it's lost all meaning. Cleat cleat cleat. If you're curious about pronunciation, it rhymes with yeet. Don't yeet your cleat!
@Andrzej Re: Scrabble, you're not missing much. It's a pretty boring game. But it has its fans and is the basis for popular things like Words With Friends. Yes this felt very much like a mediocre themed Monday. As a Thursday it's... not acceptable.
ZA? Really? I'm a busy person, but one more syllable is not going to break me.
@Nancy J. I've eaten tons of pizza in my life and we never called it ZA. I'm 1/4 Sicilian so I would know.
@Nancy J. I've been hearing "za" for pizza since the 80's, usually from Italians and usually from New Yorkers.
@Nancy J. Actually, ZA is a real word and one of the famous two-letter words you need to memorize to win at scrabble ;-)
A grammar niggle for our esteemed columnist and his copy editor, if any. You wrote: "Playing the word...descends family game night into a chaos from which it may never recover." I'm pretty sure that the game night is the subject of 'descends', not its object. You can descend a staircase, a STEP, or a mountain. You can't descend a game. Of course, the game night can itself descend into chaos. (Ah, memories!) 😌
@SBK in TO From my experience, the most chaos-inducing board game was always Diplomacy. It was often the case that lying, backstabbing, and breaking written treaties usually led to someone rage quitting and damaged friendships.
@SBK in TO It feels right to me, but a little old-timey, to use descends that way. I don't know enough to explain why. It just sounds right. I suppose it strikes me as reminiscent of something Jane Austen might have written.
@SBK in TO If you consider "family game night" as a figuratively descendible object, this sentence seems to check out. It makes as much sense as "Playing 'SUMMIT' to win the Scrabble game was the peak of family game night", in my opinion, despite not having physically climbed anything. The playing itself traverses something with highs and lows ("family game night") to a too-low place ("a chaos"), and the playing ("it") may never recover. The subject/object disagreement you're describing assumes an implied "One" at the start of the sentence, I think.
Loved this one! I generally don't enjoy all the overly clever tricks of the usual Thursdays & usually skip them. I wish NYT would create a separate puzzle for the rebuses and other complicated tricks and keep the crossword as a crossword. I liked the uses of the blanks in this one though. That made sense.
A very nice puzzle published on the wrong day of the week. And although the clue for 33 A is fine, I'm in a picky mood and would like to note that wherever Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd is performed, they serve MEAT PIEs not just on Broadway. That's all, folks. Going back to trying to recall the names of American architects.
@Vaer A clue does not need to be as general as possible. Perfect Thursday puzzle, for me.
@Gavin Thanks for explaining. You didn't really read where I acknowledge that in my comment.