Phil
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Feels like a lot of the tougher crosswords at the moment are tough because the clues are ambiguous - lots of possible answers and no real hint as to which should be right - rather than clever. I’m getting through them ok, but finding them laborious. This one in particular just felt like obscure solutions with tenuous clues, rather than the sort that make you mutter aloud when you realise you’ve been led up the proverbial garden path by clever phrasing. This was more like being led out into a field without a map.
@nash.mark believe me, nobody looking at the US at the moment is having any difficulty remembering WWII
@Jay T there was nothing “politically slanted” in there - if anything the column showed particularly objective restraint. It’s a column about the crossword and current events mean one clue comes with particularly timely connotations which it’s helpful to acknowledge when it comes to solving. I know there are some people who, for a variety of reasons, want to pretend politics isn’t happening, but it is, and at the moment it’s so fundamentally messed up that it’s even affecting crossword solves.
Nice to get the gimmick early ish to help with other solves. Some obscure stuff but balanced overall. My great bugbear with the NYT crossword remains the tendency to use “informally” or “in brief” when what they mean is they’re about to brutalise a word beyond common recognition to get it into the grid. I’ve spent many AFTS grumbling about this.
Interesting take-away from today’s frustration: even though the ‘solution’ clue is perfectly clear about what’s going on, it seems most folk (me included!) struggle to decipher the theme when the underlying trickery is in how the clues are worded rather than how the answers are. I repeated EIFFEL TOWER and PARTYSUp (struggled with that cross as a Brit lacking overly specific knowledge of baseball team notations!) until I was bored of hearing them and gave up achieving anything other than a laborious solve, despite SPEECHTOTEXT being clearly referred to as for use writing the clues, not the solutions. It was o my on reading the article that I understood the puzzle. Thinking back, this way around has confounded/frustrated others in recent puzzles. I wonder why. In general, I didn’t have fun with this one. Too obscure in the crosses to not have to look up, and even the wordy ones didn’t feel intuitive. Would prob have liked it if I’d cracked the theme. Will remember for next time! (Will almost certainly not remember for next time)
I was the other way around from the article today. Wasn’t getting it; couldn’t grasp why I wasn’t getting it, didn’t trust answers, wasn’t even trusting trivia solves. As a Brit, even after a year of doing these, I still forget to consider rebuses until my brains are about to spray out of my ears. But once I realised what was going on it all fell into place and I was done within minutes. Great job, in other words.
Ok as a Brit I’m usually mindful that language differences occur across the pond and they’re interesting to learn about and I keep an open mind - none of this ‘it’s our language’ nonsense from me - language evolves constantly, everywhere. But. We call them storeys over here precisely to avoid this sort of clever wordplay in our crosswords. And naught means naught and aught means anything but naught, except, apparently in the US, I learn, where it means naught again, as well as, from what I can glean, also not naught. How does anything work?
I always think the mark of a good puzzle is when, even if you struggle to get a clue, once you have it the answer seems obvious. I don’t think this puzzle achieves that. But then there is always an element of trickiness when trying to solve from across the pond, so perhaps it is just that.
Grumbled and frowned and generally felt most displeased by this until I grasped what was going on and realised that, far from obscure, it was just very cleverly conceived and very cleverly done. 10/10, no notes.
@Jack I put tv in all the rebus squares and nothing worked until I found the two mistakes I’d made
While I will always take time to appreciate a good pun, I’ll also take time to bemoan a poor clue. I always hate to see “informally” at the end of a clue because it is NYT shorthand for ‘spelled any way the setter came up with to fit the grid’. But even with this in mind, “Declares, informally” still stands out as possibly my least favourite clue in all the time I’ve been doing crosswords.
Enjoyed this, though, as others have said, it felt like a clever Wednesday rather than a Thursday. I daresay it’s much harder to construct than to solve, but a few more of the anagrams would have maybe lifted it. My only real gripe is probably a British thing. I had spoof down for Spaceballs, and realised it wasn’t that quite quickly, but then kept inputting then removing FARCE because it didn’t feel like a good fit for Spaceballs. Maybe this is just the battle ground where theatre grads and film grads come to blows, but there’s more to Farce than just silly jokes; it’s a genre in which a whole conceptual escalation leads to ridicule, and Spaceballs is a ridiculous masterpiece but its core comes from, obviously, its distortion of its source material, and not from an original core concept.
I’m quite prepared to accept we’ve huge gulfs in how our shared language has developed over the years. But has anyone, ever, said “relo” out loud?
Felt completely stuck here for about fifteen minutes and then it was like a penny dropped and I finished most of the puzzle in ten. Hats off to MINNESOTANICE. I had some of the blanks to fill in and was thinking “ICE are the literal antithesis of polite and friendly, *especially* in Minnesota right now,” but then the penny dropped. Bravo.
@Eric yeah, this one annoyed me. I get not wanting it to be too easy a puzzle, but cluing a definitively gin cocktail with vodka variants as vodka cocktail when it could have just been gin cocktail is needlessly obtuse. Tau instead of chi was similarly weird, as was Minorca instead of Menorca - though judging by my autocorrect perhaps the last one is just an Americanism that hasn’t travelled
Maybe this is one of the problems with being an overseas player. I just didn’t see enough of an issue with the wormhole-clues to realise they must be incomplete - I’m used to just not fully understanding some references until I’ve looked them up! And I didn’t get why there were blank clues - I just figured the app had glitched. Thankfully the accompanying article helped and I actually completed quicker than usual. The good and bad aspects of 2020s puzzling in the same fell swoop… no reflection on the puzzle itself, which was cleverer than I was!
I wish they’d get the notation right for best director. I get the rationale, the point is that when the year is given in brackets it becomes the year awarded, not the year of the release (hence the latest winner is Nolan (2024)). It’s one of those things where you look at it, puzzled, then remember “oh, that’s the way NYT does it, rather than everybody else, including the academy”, which isn’t the best look.
@Lorne Eckersley exactly this. I loved novocaine and didn’t mind armresthog but the general knowledge ones were so obscure that it was difficult to get enough crosses to access the wordplay. I solved it but not without resorting to Google more than once.
Based on this and the Connections, do you guys not say things like “See you anon” anymore on your side of the pond?
As well as the obscurities, this one had a bona fide grammar error in the cluing: Completing a video game as fast as possible, say Speedrunning Complete a video game as fast as possible, say Speedrun Feel like this week’s puzzles have all had entries that have been just a bit off. I don’t for a second think they’ve entrusted their editing to AI, but the issues that have come up have all had that weird sort of feel.
@Super8ing when I first started doing the NYT crossword I was thrown by the use of the rebus function. But once I understood that it was just a different way of approaching the puzzles I just did the crosswords; I didn’t refuse to and then write about it. It’s not like it isn’t clearly explained in the title screen and the accompanying article.
@Margaret I’m lost. The answer was OVAL, which is a shape that isn’t round.
@Marie same. And while I knew enough Italian to know cotta was viable and correct it, no amount of mucking about with translation tools has let me bring cotta up as a result for baked (not least as it directly translates from cooked, not baked!). Feel like it’s a good example of the whole puzzle, really. Fiddly rather than clever.
@Ms. Billie M. Spaight as in, a team that need to do some reckoning (calculating) on a competition day. It’s a terrible, terrible clue.
@MExpatbit surely the German for “a” is “ein”? As in, if you were in a German class and learning the word for “a”?
@Paul hate to wellackshually this but “some but not all” is a great example of the tendency towards redundancy in English rhetoric, precisely because they are synonymous. As in, if you say “some”, you by definition mean “not all” and therefore don’t need to add it.
@Jonathan Baldwin the clue is Ireland, to the Irish. So if Eire is an Irish word, for Ireland, and the clue is Ireland, to the Irish, then Eire is right, no?
Just had to look up the gender agreement for amie. Exceptions to French language rules creating additional complexity for this overthinker…
Liked this, eventually, *but* I think there needed to be a clue to the theme somewhere. Or, more appropriately, something to hint that there wasn’t one way of solving but several ways. I spent ages trying to cross-pollinate the logic from the different circles before the NW’s utter contempt for my sanity made me realise that they were all doing different, equally clever, things. Not sure about the Texas clue, but was able to parse it after solving with crossings then Google the actual slogan. All in all, though, probably about right, given that I got there in the end.
@JohnM just don’t do Sundays. You’ll be fine.
Wait, you guys put symbols in your crosswords over there? Every day’s a school day…
Tough one for a Brit today; took me longer than usual. Main issue for the longest time was tOYbOY - knew it couldn’t be right but the crossing letters suggested it was until my wife, having had books published in the US and having gone through the editing process for them, set me straight. Otherwise maybe a couple too many trivia clues; I found the tricksy ones satisfying so no complaints there.
@Fluffy Drunk Koala I always take the circles to be an indication that some meta solving is in order
Can’t help feel that “good looking couple”, while solvable, doesn’t quite parse. “Couple of lookers” would have been better.
Finished but a couple of these (NE and SE short corner clues) I got with crosses and still have no idea what I should have been thinking. TIL we can add woodpeckers (of all things!) to the list of objects that contribute to the transatlantic divide. Ours are carnivores this side of the pond. Loved the pop at X in the NW corner. It is, indeed, like Westworld in there these days.
@Andrzej I know hectoring as bothering, as in stop hectoring me, but don’t know its origins. I’d say it’s fairly common but perhaps not everyday. Also I’m 44 so wouldn’t be surprised if it’s less common now than when I was picking this stuff up as a kid! When I got CURST and ABLED I thought this was going to be one to endure rather than enjoy. Then I got ETCH A SKETCH and rather reconsidered.
Solved the whole thing without ever getting near to understanding the gimmick. It’s admirably clever, but perhaps a little too clever for this Brit.
@Andrzej glam and posh simply aren’t synonymous. At all. Nearest I can fathom is maybe if a woman gets glammed up they can be said to put on their posh frocks? But it’s a leap followed by a short haul flight. Rose hips are seeds, I think? Or rather the little fruit things that hold the seeds of roses. And yeah, the put me in coach (or, as I had it until way after the end, on coach) was sports. I’d never heard of hegira either; as an English teacher of 18 years who worked with an on-average 50% Muslim cohort I’m gonna go ahead and call that one obscure.
@Rebecca Yep, to eBay or not to eBay as a translation of to be or not to be is, I think, my favourite ever NYT crossword entry.
These ones always - and I do mean always - catch me out. I’m so busy complaining that the answers don’t have the feature they’re purported to that it doesn’t occur to me to double check the clue.
@Patricia Henry haji is a variant of the more common spelling, hajji. As with many Arabic translations/transliterations, it gets a pass because the spellings aren’t nailed down, but (for me, at least) such variant spellings always feel like a cop-out (I hate when the answer is kebab, for example, because I’m immediately aware that there are three ways it might be spelled, whereas in the U.K. there’s only one).
This one made me laugh aloud when I did REALIsE what it was doing. Stubborn English English spelling of the word in the previous sentence cost me a PB, alas, until I took a proper look at meze in the clues list.
@Andrew yeah I thought that must have been a US/U.K. thing till I googled and it’s ambience both sides of the pond, with ambiance an alternate spelling. I’m not fond of alternate spellings to the norm being crossword solutions.
NW corner was just nonsensical for this one. Misdirects in the cluing changing the grammar such that some of the answers no longer matched the clues, and in others the limits of semantic ambiguity being stretched in both clue and answer such that they barely overlapped even when the answer became apparent. And don’t even get me started on ZTILE. If these clues were jokes they’d be groaners, and not in the good way.
This was great. Hadn’t a clue what was going on until I got the explainer, after which it would have been plain sailing had I not been convinced that the yellow worms were EARth and, as I always end up doing, then spending a very grumpy ten minutes complaining to myself that none of it made sense, until I realised that no, it was I who did not make sense…
Few simple crosses to help with the obscure cluing. I feel like this was the hardest Saturday I’ve done and I don’t really enjoy Saturdays. Really liked some but too many were lacking clear steers. The one I got stuck on was ROMe - there was no fair game indicator that that would be in home language. Whole thing felt like that. Clever, but lacking cleverness.
Quick side-of-the-Atlantic check: 24D should have been clued in the singular, right? One that got past the editors? Or is there an Americanism I don’t know about? (I don’t mean that facetiously; it’s often the explanation and this is how I find out!)
Thought I was going mad. Got the wordplay, thought it was sorted and spent ages scanning for why it wasn’t going through as finished. Not aware of Eton shirtmakers, so had no cross to solve DERMO, which presumably gives us dermAtitis and dermAtology? Do any words start with dermO?
@Tristan it’s the letters that are symmetrical, not the words. I also got maximus at first, owing to never having heard of abysm. The slow down spelled unusually was just lazy, and many of the clues were either bizarrely obscure and obliquely referenced, or simply clued and words used in the crossword almost every day, meaning a crossword that was equal parts disappointing and frustrating.
Got briefly held up by the fact there were 16-bit Nintendo consoles and I have no knowledge of surfing beyond that it involves water and I stumbled across the hang 5 trick without knowing there was a hang 10. Otherwise, a satisfying puzzle.