John
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NJ
Is a DOMEDROOF like a “dome”? 😜
@NYC Traveler Oh, yes. French mathematician, actress, game character (why the editors like that category is a mystery to me), Greek island (spellable in two ways). A polynatick.
The Hydra was not a sea monster. It was found (legendarily) at Lerna in the Peloponnesus, in a swamp. There is a sea creature, not monstrous, called hydra after the monster, with its multi-headed appearance.
Minor thing, but the middle vowel in SILENCE is a legit short e, not what the answer claims it is.
@MoriokaBoy Yeah, and also cannoli, which is plural. I didn’t know,why this keeps happening to Italian words. Very annoying to have in the puzzle.
61D: if it’s AD, then it’s BC. If you use BCE to avoid the overly Christian reference, then you’re certainly not going to refer to “the year of our Lord”, so BCE pairs with CE.
99D is misspelled. I’m sure there’s a variant, but the standard spelling is -OR. Had to go through the whole thing to find this “mistake”.
@Isaac Unfortunately the Times does. It’s a common “alternative” in the puzzle. They also use panini as a singular. 🤦🏽♂️
First, I’d call TIL a clipping, not a contraction. And it’s not poetic. But really TILL is the word and it’s not a form of until at all. It’s its own word. A battle I have given up (not really, as this comment shows).
@B Agreed on almost all of this. Fresh salad is particularly egregious. I had “green” for example, which strikes me as more of a set phrase. On the bee I now stop after genius because the choices both in and out are so absurd.
No one seems to have commented on 27A. It hasn’t been clued this way in a while, but it’s wrong. Ore has to be smelted to yield metal. (The metal atoms are bound up in compounds, generally oxides of some sort, and need to be reduced to their metallic form.)
@TMD Yes, it does, but this is of course a beer tap. And @Andrzej is right, it’s from tapping a barrel or other container of liquid.
2D seems a little weak. And why spell out the T in 15A? But I really really hate the colloquial phrases as clues, like 17A. They just seem lazy to me, way too many options to be known or guessed with any confidence.
@Nate Agree. Also my last fill. Not a big deal, but the clue should not have had “58 Down” within the quotation marks. The first time through I read it as the actual movie name (thought it was some obscure football romance or something) and didn’t realize my mistake until I hit 58 down itself. Mondays are fast, so I don’t waste time overthinking a clue that I don’t immediately get. Again, not a huge deal, but unnecessarily sloppy. C’mon, editors.
@jes It was changed, at least in Italy, because of a famous porn star of the late 20th century with the same name.
@Gabrielle This is the group that stopped publishing the digital acrostic, so, no, they don’t get it.
Pretty fast one for me. Minor nit (redundant?): 17D - they’re often not cognates. If they were, then they likely wouldn’t belong to the category. Point is that these are words that appear to be cognates, and so with similar meanings, but instead have very different meanings. Some are cognates, like “actual” and Italian “attuale,” to be sure.
@Alex There’s even a name for that! (Natick)
@Andrzej “Near East” is in fact an older name for the area in English, especially, in my experience, in scholarship on the area. I’m not quite sure how the “Middle” got attached to what is clearly the closest part of the “east”.
@SBK A Milanese mamma would surely use the singular, yes. Hopefully this was a joke, otherwise you really need to learn how language works. (I suspect she also use a more generic word than the pasta type.) This use of the plural grates on me as well. If we can use the correct singular for cappuccino, we can do it for panino. More broadly though it’s interesting how the plural has caught on with this. Usually we take a singular and use an English s-plural on it (like pastas), but in this case we somehow got a plural and have singularized it.
@Laura And there’s a Unicode combining low line character that solves this problem: C̲
Sphinxes don’t make cat noises. They have human heads, so they talk. Ask Oedipus. (Yes, I know there’s a sphinx cat.)
@Joe Nope, that would be for biologists. It’s a bad clue.
Anybody else tired of fairy-tale clues always referring to the Disney movie?
@Andrzej Completely agree about mice. I thought that might be the answer, but didn’t get it. Frankly I still don’t. Too much of a stretch. Otherwise very smooth sailing for me. More like a Wednesday difficulty, I thought .
Half my usual time, so, yeah, a Wednesday. PS my stats show that Thursday is a much bigger jump from Wednesday than any other day is from its predecessor. The Thursday-Friday gap also is veeeeery slowly closing.
@NobodyThree Exactly. These [] clues are far from my favorites, but this one was bizarre. Let’s just make up combinations to fit the crosses. And, yes, two or three “nom”s would have been ok.
@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.
@Steve L Yeah, you can get the right answer on the cross (as I did), but PAH just isn’t a word people use. There was no way to get that without the cross. It’s not just obscure, like tenrec, it’s downright nonexistent. Bad editing.
@KK Yeah, as often for me, the hint was no help. I saw the pattern. And, no, hominem and homonym are not pronounced the same way. Close, but not the same. I get that it, but not a great clueing, imo.
@Nora Yep, I had trouble with this block. Gonna say that PING is not a sound so much as a verb. You ping someone or some site, like a submarine does with sonar. The sound itself is a ding or bing, as in “the machine that goes…”
Tivoed seems a bit outdated to be appearing without some kind of “erstwhile” marker. Also the comic nerds, Cerebro is actually a giant computer for which the headset serves as an interface.
@Heidi No, it’s not you, just another in the long line of themes that provide no help in solving. I’ll bet 90% of regular puzzlers don’t use Thursday themes to solve. At best they help me with one solution, but typically zero.
@CB That’s an odd definition of finishing the puzzle. So if I don’t understand a clue, but I fill it out via the crosses, then I haven’t solved the puzzle? I agree with others about this: easy for a Thursday (half my average time) and no need for the theme.
@Lakshmi Came to say the same. It’s commonly misused, but that should have been clued with “slangily” or something. Biceps, triceps, quadriceps: two-, three- and four-headed muscles, resp.
@Louise Indeed. Sloppy editing. Maleska would’ve known. :-)
What do we call clues that rely on a slangy of spoke version of another phrase? Like 49A today. Whatever it is, I find them irksome and unsatisfying. And there seemed to be a larger number than usual today.
@Barry Ancona Agreed. Nice puzzle, just on the wrong day.
@Jonathan Those colloquial ones are just lazy editing IMO. They can come up with almost anything and it’s often impossible to know as a solver that you’ve guessed right. What sound is it? Aw, oh, ah…
@Joe Zed-Ess What bugs me is the NYT’s lack of understanding of good stats. They give us Connections info in heaps. Most common first answer, most common mistake, etc. Meanwhile they can’t give us average solve times for the crossword. And of course they’ve now ruined the personal stats they do give us.
I realize these are edited by human beings, but I’m still confused about why certain short answers, which I assume are the editors’ choices, appear in bunches. For example, PBJ has appeared several times in the past week or so, after not showing up for a while. It’s not that it’s a bad answer, but if you play every day, you see the repetition and it detracts from the challenge, for me anyway. I’m surprised this kind of thing doesn’t get caught and prevented.
@Jeb Jones Atlas doesn’t hold the world in his hands in myth. He holds the sky on his back. Otherwise where would he stand? That said, the artistic convention became showing him holding a globe of some kind.
@Joe Yes, a poet uses the “wrong” word for effect. The whole point of the line is that “none” isn’t a number. 100§ agree with OP. None is not the answer to that question.
@Bill in Yokohama Agree. Shortz is back and we get two out of the ordinary puzzles? Maybe a little recalibration is needed. Also odd to have a Tuesday theme, of course (as usual of little help).
@Andrzej Came to say the same. Bad editing.
53D is very poorly clued. An EON is a long period of time, while an ERA is a period of time marked by some person or event, like the often used “Obama era”. It doesn’t have to be long, as 8 years isn’t, just notable.
Here to complain about the editor’s(?) laziness. ESP was in exactly the same position yesterday: first item in the fifth row.
@Cindy Strong agree. Soonest makes no sense to me.
@Wes Yes, a pleasant change from the past few days. A Natick or two, but still enjoyable.
@Chuck Berger Just awful. Who was complaining that they wanted to see less info without clicking? I’m also glad they have the resources for this, but couldn’t maintain the on-line acrostic. If they want to fix something, add an option to show only the last X weeks, so we can see if we’re improving or not.