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I FEVER: [makes people camp outside the Apple store?]
TIL that GOOGLE DRIVE has the same number of letters as APPLE ICLOUD.
I solved the whole thing without getting the theme, even though I knew from the title that it had to do with Pig Latin. Even after reading the explanations, I'm not sure I really get it. If you had told me it was a themeless puzzle, I'd have believed it. Maybe it's because I was too old when I first encountered Pig Latin. 😅 Not my cup of tea. Or OJ or au lait...
I wanted [Enterprise enterprise] to be something like BOLDLY GO (where no man has gone before). 🖖
I went to Yale, and no one ever mentioned UPenn. The only rival people cared about was Harvard. :-)
Today I learned that PASEO is recognized as an English word. I knew it from Spanish and saw that it fit, but I resisted it until proven overwhelmingly by the crosses because the clue did not suggest the answer would be a foreign word. So I looked it up in Merriam-Webster, and there it is! Another of the many Spanish loanwords English. Loved the puzzle, by the way, especially DANCING WITH THE TSARS.
I'm reminded of an old joke: Amount of beauty required to launch 1 ship? 1 millihelen.
@SusanEM me too, but now that I know that numbers are allowed, I suppose one could enter C2H4. 🤓
@Linda Bernstein, I don't know about your autocorrect, but SOLI is a dictionary word, and not too obscure in my opinion. It's the plural of SOLO, which is a very common word.
For an ignoramus like me who had never heard the word "kashrut" and couldn't even recognize the language, the chosen clue made it harder and more interesting; I learned something. If they had gone with "Jewish dietary rules", it would have been pretty obvious, but as it was, I thought the clue might have something to do with Kashmir.
@Josh, I had never heard of contronyms, mentioned in the article for RAVEL, so I looked it up, and one of the examples is "to dust", which can mean either to remove dust, such as while cleaning the bookshelf, or to add dust, for example while looking for fingerprints. Primed with that, I initially had a surely mistaken but also ambiguous and hilarious reading of your comment. :-)
You don't need to be a Lego aficionado to know MINIFIGs: you just need to have kids. At least that was my experience! 🙂
At the very end I was stuck with TEXTBOT / TRAYS, but the latter didn't make sense for [Looks below the surface?] (I originally had DRAGS for that one, but overrode it when I found ACHY). I thought TEXT BOT made sense, as in software used by scammers to send text messages asking people to "enter" their information. I just couldn't see the answer until I approached the end of the alphabet: TEXT BOA? Nope TEXT BOB? Nope TEXT BOD? Nope TEXT BOG? Nope TEXT BOO? Nope TEXT BOP? Nope TEXT BOW? Nope TEXT BOX? Facepalm
I had AID for 1D instead of the rebus (by reading "provided assistance" as "assistance that was provided"), but saw that you could make the correct answer for 19A, IDEEFIXE, by going down, then right, then up, and then right. In other words, doing a sort of hairpin turn. So I thought that was the gimmick! So when I reached the revealer at 69 A, I thought at first that it was BEWARE TURNS. /facepalm IEFIXE DE
Was I the only one who thought that baseball was the "obvious" topic for "perfectly pitched" and that therefore the question mark in [Perfectly pitched?] meant it was about something else, such as music? My first try was TUNED.
"Perfect" as verb vs noun are not homophones, they are homographs / heteronyms. Homophone means "same sound", that is, same pronunciation. Wikipedia has a nice Venn diagram with all these terms.
@Reuben I was completely stumped by that one. I checked everything twice after filling in the puzzle, but never thought of the alternate spelling, and had never heard of the wafer brand, so I had to give up and look at the answer key. :-(
@Steven M. Amazing! I couldn't enter the answers on the phone that fast even if I had them perfectly memorized.
I thought for a moment that [Reds' fandom?] might be COMMUNISTS. It has the right number of letters!
The first "chemical twin" that came to mind was ISOTOPE, but it didn't fit. Calling ISOMERS "twins" is a stretch, because they can differ from each other more that Arnold Schwarzenegger differs from Danny DeVito. The classical example is urea vs ammonium cyanate, both with the formula CH₄N₂O. One is an inorganic salt, the other an organic compound which is part of nitrogen metabolism. Or consider ethanol vs dimethyl ether (C₂H₆O): one is a liquid you can drink (although some say you shouldn't); the other is a gas used as a propellant. Isomers have as much to do with each other as the word ISOMER has to do with MOIRES: they are anagrams.
And there I thought that the grid art was alluding to the copyright symbol! ©
I had the feeling that I had never heard of JAMAISVU before, even though I know I must have...
@Dean It's just crosswordese. Very common, but not as common as ATE, ERA, ETA, EST, IRA, ALE, ELI, ODE, ALA, TSA, ART, EMO, END, or TRI, if we go by the 2025 stats. Admittedly, it seems to be trending up a bit over the last few years.
@Susan, I liked the puzzle and thought the theme was great, but I have to say, as a relative beginner, that I had to look up more obscure (to me) facts than in a typical Sunday! PANANG / KASBAH / GSIX (the latter seems obvious in hindsight, but I have a blind spot for partially expanded acronyms); SOMALI / SHILOH / MOTTST; EUGENE; MORAYS (I had "DORAYS" crossing NOD, which seemed plausible enough). Maybe others I forget.
The only city I could think of was Portland, but it would only fit as PORTLANDOR or maybe PORTLANDIA. It wasn't until I did a buch of the crosses that I realized it was Bend and had a good CHORTLE.
@Jess Here are some ideas for future constructors: - Recently dissolved HK liberal party (League of Social Democrats) - Tail end of a number, for short (Least significant digit) - Dead programming dialect derived from PL/I (Language for Systems Development) - Positraction gear train type: abbr. (Limited-slip differentcial) - Type of NiMH battery that can store charge for longer (Low self-discharge) - Cattle cutaneous condition letters (Lumpy skin disease) I know, too obscure. I wouldn't guess any of them myself. Just found them on Wikipedia. :-)
I know this was statistically "easy" for a Friday, and indeed has been my fastest Friday so far, but I loved it, not because of my time, but because it had my kind of topics: physics, chess, mixology, legos, prison architecture... :-) all those were gimmes. The one exception among the longer entries was the one about rap, which will always be one of my weak spots.
I felt so sure that [Cardinal point?] would be PAPALCONCLAVE until the crosses convinced me otherwise...
LOL, it shows my ignorance of birding that I didn't realize that the full answers to the theme clues were actual bird names. I thought they were only puns that ended with a (relatively generic) bird name. That is, I knew hawks, but not Cooper's hawks, crows, but not American crows, parrots, but not Amazon parrots...
I saw the pattern of the center as a "tilted square", so I had TILTED instead of DOTTED for the longest time. FACEPALM!
I feel bad for users of other keyboard layouts.
@Morn That's why crosswords have *cross* words! The clues can be ambiguous, and that's part of the challenge. Figuring out which answer fits with the help of the crosses is the game. You are going to hate Fridays and Saturdays. Those days, you often count yourself lucky when a clue has only three plausible answers! :-)
@SBS There's no denying the fact that some streakers have gotten tased, but I agree that it is excessive force, potentially deadly, and not something I would want to make fun of.
I immediately saw ARTISTIC LICENSE, which has the right number of letters, but later dropped the whole thing after I saw that some of the crosses on the left didn't work with it. By the time I had found CREATIVE, I had some crosses on the right that were wrong, so I never thought of LICENSE again until the very end! (Which finally allowed me to get those crosses right.) So close, yet so far away!
@Petrol Don't forget about rappers, a favorite topic of puzzle constructors but my personal kryptonite.
For a moment there I thought that the amswer to [Where the sidewalk ends] was BURB...
INOT had me confused for a moment; I was wondering if untying ties is something that's practiced in occupational therapy...
@Francis I did enter ARTS immediately, but I get you, I'm often befuddled by clues where the answer is an extremely broad category based on very specific examples. I'm thinking [Nelson Mandela and Charlie Chaplin] where the answer is EARTHLINGS. (OK, I just made that one up. :-) I also did enter AROSE at first for 9A, but in "pencil" because it felt iffy.
@Steven M. I was OK with MIASMA, but BLEDSOE / PIMLICO was an absolute Natick for me. I had to look them up.
The TRAFFIC JAM clue was unnecessarily cryptic when seen in the NYT app or website, because it shows three slices of road on a single line: |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| For the print version, it was laid out like this, which makes more sense: |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X|
@Dave K. I always thought of Sundays as embiggened Thursdays, not Wednesdays, because Sundays tend to have the same sorts of gimmicks seen on Thursdays, such as rebuses, words that change direction, etc.
@Jane Wheelaghan LUCHADORA is literally Spanish for "(female) fighter/wrestler".
@Andrzej Keep in mind that the clues are often rewritten by the editors, so it's hard to tell whether the constructor was actually responsible for the clues that you disliked. Like you, I had almost nothing after a pass! In cases like this I resort to googling the simple trivia but this puzzle actually doesn't have that much of that!
@Steven M.I made the same mistake plus AiR for Aer Lingus, resulting in the even weirder MOfABLiFEAST!
As a former Harvard postdoc, I had no trouble solving the puzzle but did not get the theme until I read this column. :-) GELID was not a problem for me because I was familiar with "gélido", which I think is not as uncommon in Spanish as gelid is in English, and also has the benefit of sounding similar to "hielo", which is Spanish for ice, since they share the same Latin root.
I had TAG for [Besmirch], thinking of graffiti, but then wondered what on Earth is a "gag bag"? Not that I had ever heard of rag bags, either... I take it that this was no coincidence but the editors were sitting on it waiting for a heat wave? :-) The crossing of MAMACASS with TERRACHIPS was a Natick for me. Had to Google those.
Shouldn't the clue for NOLA [The Big Easy] allude to the fact that it is an acronym? Even though NOLA was the first answer that occurred to me, I thought it couldn't be right, so I looked fruitlessly for other ideas, such as *FILM (there's one with that title from 1986, but maybe too obscurefor a Tuesday).
@abelsey There was also SERVER NOT FOUND yesterday. Not exactly the same, but related.
@Isa According to Google's ngram viewer, "brier patch" was still more common than "briar patch" as recently as 1920, and "brier patch" is still in use today even though it's outnumbered by "briar patch" by about a factor of 11. I'd say that makes it a minor but valid spelling.
@Chris Both MISE EN PLACE, SERAPE, and ROTI all have been adopted into American English and have entries in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. You just need a more "global" perspective, not only in the sense of countries and languages, but of occupations, hobbies, food, etc.: MISE EN PLACE is standard vocabulary in the restaurant business; you might hear it in cooking shows, for example. I have certainly encountered the term, even though I have never worked at a restaurant and may have watched approximately 1.5 episodes of cooking shows in my life. Now, SAL I had never heard of. Everyone has their weaknesses! :-)