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@Asher B. I honestly couldn't disagree more. Gimmicks are what make Thursdays the best day of the week. >> The puzzle actually appears to mean "a scrambled bird." No, it's literally reversing the letters of the birds. FALLENARCHES, your example, has ENARC in it, which is CRANE in reverse. You "flip the bird" (i.e., reverse these letters, not unscramble them) and get the answer FALLCRANEHES. I do prefer gimmicks where the answer makes up its own word or phrase, so that does get a small demerit from me, but I love gimmicks enough to overlook it.
I'll miss your writing quite a lot, Deb. Take care and God bless.
The bolded Ms in the clues were *unbelievably* distracting. The puzzle would have been so much better without them.
I'm just here to point out that "ye" in "ye olde shoppe" (and the like) is not actually what most people think it is. The 'y' is actually the old English letter thorn (Þ). It's the way English used to represent the "th" sound (as in "the"). In writing, this looked fairly close to a 'p' and, over time, became closer and closer to a 'y'. "Ye" olde shoppe is actually "the" olde shoppe.
I guess I have a dirty mind tonight because my brain did not parse HAVEATIT correctly at first.
@Mooße I don't understand why people get offended by the word cisgender. Do other adjectives also offend you? Old? Humid? Porous? Preantepenultimate? Does just the prefix 'cis-' offend you? It's been used as the antonym of trans- in English for centuries. Cisalpine, for example, was first used in the 1500s.
8D, 9D, 10D all crossing 8D made for a crossing of 4 answers that I didn't know. That was a personal Natick nightmare.
@Joanne It quite literally does. M-W: not domesticated or cultivated : wild OED: Of an animal: Wild, untamed
@Alexandra Dixon "And esoteric knowledge (such as Thomas Jefferson saying the Ohio River was the most beautiful on earth" While I've never heard this quote, I immediately thought OHIO for the clue for two reasons. 1) I would assume Thomas Jefferson was talking about a river within the US 2) The most famous US river that is 4 letters would be the OHIO river
It always saddens me when I see my fellow solvers complain about learning a new word. That's one of the joys of crosswords for me.
For me, this is the hardest crossword in ages, Saturdays included. And if this is how hard it was today, I'm scared poopless of tomorrow.
@Angela The phrase is "without further ado". Think of a host chitchatting with the audience, talking up the program or the speaker that's coming. "Without further ado, I present to you ". They're done making an ado and they're getting to the main event.
@David B > NAZCA If you've never heard of NAZCA lines, they're really quite fascinating. Huge drawings in the Nazca Desert made 1500-2500 years ago, and remarkably preserved thanks to the climate and isolation. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines</a>
@Aaron If there are clues that don't make sense, there are many helpful posters here who are willing to help it make sense.
I'll take 3 scoops, please and thank you. In 2020, I did a lot of hiking in the White Mountains, and I rewarded myself with ice cream from the New Hampshire Ice Cream Trail, traveling all over the state. I finished the trail and got a sweatshirt for my efforts. Would do it again if I didn't hate driving.
Very clever puzzle. I had a hard time with it until understanding the revealer, at which point it mostly fell into place. I do have one gripe, though. The themed clues have improper capital letters. If the asterisks represent B or N, then the first letter after the asterisk should not be capitalized. BAllot, NAcre, NIce, BOvid, BAssist, and NAscent? Tsk, tsk.
I'm confused by the people who attest that 'wit' is for whiz and not ONIONs. I haven't been in Philly since 2012, but it's definitely onions from my personal experience. It's a *cheese*steak, it doesn't make any sense to have to specify whether or not it has cheese. It wouldn't be a cheesesteak without cheese (or "cheez"). The kind of cheese, sure, you can clarify, but not its very presence.
I don't know why so many people are complaining about the difficulty. This is the easiest Tuesday so far this year! ;-)
Bottom right took me the longest, since I'm unfamiliar with the term COUNTINGNOSES and ABIE's Irish Rose, and I don't have the cot/caught merger that makes LON work. When my brain finally remembered the ALGEBRA half of BOOLEANALGEBRA, I was able to clear it all up.
Based on my solve times and my feeling while doing the puzzles, Wednesday and Friday got switched. Today felt very easy, whereas Wednesday provided resistance, with Thursday sitting between the two.
@A.R. Why do you find a nonjudgmental descriptor offense? Does blue also offend you? How about rectangular? Tall? Where's the logic?
I am almost never in tune with Sam's puzzles, but today was an easy Saturday for me. My last letter filled in was PRAGENCY/RAGE, and I first asked myself "what the heck is pragency?" until I realized PR Agency, doh!
@Mark Not sure if you're asking for clarity, but "DEES" is the answer because the word "diamond" starts and ends with a D. So, DEES are the edges of the word. The clue is given a question mark to indicate you need to think of it in a punny or stretchy way. (Question marks are presented more rarely on a Saturday; it's usually left to the solver to figure out the clue is a stretch or a dad joke.)
For people who still feel the loss of Pluto as a planet, consider this: Pluto is smaller than our moon. Significantly so. It has 1/6th the mass of the moon. Also, Pluto is about 1200 kilometers in diameter. Texas is wider than Pluto.
My ignorance made itself the star of today's show. This is perhaps the hardest Thursday of the year for me. The puzzle was filled with trivia I did not know. I like learning new things, but I'd rather a Thursday struggle be the gimmick rather than the lack of knowledge on my part. C'est la vie.
Took me 65% longer than Saturday's puzzle. The constructor and I were definitely not on the same wavelength.
@Ernest I don't know if this will help or not, but you can try to think of it this way: the D (EDT, CDT, MDT, PDT) stands for daylight, and we have the most daylight during the summer.
@C Fraternities are named after Greek letters, and Alpha is one of the most common, since its symbolism for leadership.
I guess I was a bit too morbid for the puzzle when, upon my first glance through the clues, entered "diedofoldagE" for 33A (Naturally concluded).
I hated the theme today, but that's mainly on me, not the constructor. (1) I am bad with names (2) I didn't know about half the names The top right corner in particular was difficult for me, since I'm unfamiliar with either DONNASUMMER or SALMINEO, and I've never seen the MINEO surname before, making it unguessable for me.
When I saw 9D, the first thing that popped into my head was (the unfortunately incorrect) wascallywabbit. Right number of letters, even. Alas!
@Nancy Bonsai is the art, not a species of tree. Thus, trees used in bonsai can be aptly described as potted.
I came to see if anyone else found the puzzle as easy as I (new Friday PB). I mainly found a bunch of people complaining about the Oscar clue, which is amusing. It is clearly written ambiguously, since this is a Friday crossword. P.S. I do not understand how anyone likes olives. I trust that my friends are not just lying to me, but it is truly incomprehensible to my taste buds that someone else's could find them anything but vile.
I'm normally a good speller, but OXIDeNT forced me to flyspeck (and I'm terrible with music, so didn't know PACO de Lucía).
Even though I've never heard of Monday being laundry day, this was still my 5th fastest solve. I know some people like to complain about easy crosswords, but I think Monday is a good place for them.
I've only been crosswording for about 5 years, but I think this is my favorite Tuesday puzzle yet. Thanks, Geoffrey and Will.
I can't believe my brain came up with TRAE Young on my first pass through the clues. I don't watch basketball and I'm usually terrible with names.
I had to run the alphabet for AGU_ crossing SE_N, and then had to face palm when the answer was AGUA. Duh, John.
I guess this one just clicked with me. New fastest Sunday by almost 4 minutes. 22:50
Thing I learned today: pip: one extraordinary of its kind
Only tangentially related to the crossword today, but I thought I'd point out that some people erroneously pronounce habanero with ñ because of jalapeño. This is called hyperforeignism. Some other examples you might hear are pronouncing cache as cashay, coup de grâce as coup de gras (grah), or chorizo as choritzo (like Italian, though it's Spanish in origin).
@Aaron And with a combined 96 points, it's the highest scoring opening game in NFL history.
Like, you know, I, uh, like, such as, I think, and like, basically...I hated today's theme.
While I got it immediately, I've never heard anyone refer to programming in Java as "making some Java". The southeast was the last to fall for me, thanks to some lovely and tricky cluing on CREASED and HELDSERVE.
Lots of people complaining about EDIE/VIEIRA. I didn't know these names either, but there are only a few possibilities for E_IE names. Going through those possibilities, VIEIRA was the only answer that made sense. Naticky, maybe, but completely guessable, so not worthy of complaining.
An easy Thursday to ease us into 2026. Happy New Year.
Count me among those who made the hONEYED mistake. Of course, hAMET looks plausible to those of us bad with names.
A fine themed Friday, but a poor Thursday for my tastes. I live for the tricks.
A Thursday without a gimmick is boring. This should have been a rare themed Friday.