joel88s

@Andrzej I'm just astonished by anyone who can do crosswords in a second language, because they're so dependent on cultural context. My French is fairly fluent, but I looked a French crossword once and literally could not get a single word!

@Mimi 'Succeed' meaning 'follow', i.e. come next. I was thinking HEIR or something like that. Still a bit of a stretch.

@LStott This is pretty obscure.

@Erick Yeah that seemed off to me too. I suppose the intersecting "Sale sign words" could be OY! LESS!

@Matt And that epitomizes the difference in the way boys and girls used playdoh.

@Andrzej I'm just astonished by anyone who can do crosswords in a second language, because they're so dependent on cultural context. My French is fairly fluent, but I looked at a French crossword once and literally could not get a single word!

@Thomas That's a good call, felt off to me as well. Googling it, it seems 'pie graph' is in fact sometimes used, but it is less certainly common, and I agree less accurate, than 'pie chart.' And perhaps most importantly, "Certain chart shape" would have been just as apt and pleasing a clue. ("Certain graph shape" would have been an excellent clue, however, for BELL CURVE!)

@Andrzej Yes your English does read as essentially native, and if you're an academic I can well imagine your vocabulary might exceed the average native speaker. But yeah it's the stuff like the TV shows and commercials we grew up with, or random obscure political and social reference points, that are hard to replicate.

@Katie Sorry you're right 'tonal connection' is a bit amorphous, but I gave a few examples above (of many, many candidates) that do have it to my mind. But of course it's subjective so if you don't feel the difference then you don't. Actually your analysis of "knight shtick" hits the mark pretty well: yes "shtick" means the thing you're known for, but it doesn't mean "just" that; it carries the connotation of a contrived comedic act - so like you say, not serious enough, in fact totally opposite to and discordant with the notion of a knight's honor. I think that is indeed what rubbed me the wrong way about it. And an "athletic" connection between 'bench press' and 'put me it, coach' feels artificial and contrived to me; more meaningful is simply the pun on 'bench.' But to contrast with one of the 'better' examples I mentioned... reparsing 'ranch dressing' as 'what you might wear on a ranch' (a STETSON HAT) is natural and pleasing, whereas reparsing 'bench press' as... 'something-you-might-press-someone-to-do-while-sitting-on-the-bench'? - not so much to my ear.

@KRB Yup, I scoured the whole puzzle several times at the end looking for the mistake. I was just starting to Google Girla Girla Girla, which to be sure made zero sense, when I realized of course for an Elvis movie it would have to be Girls.

@Ned So it's not a rule, but more of a stylistic nicety. I did find it a bit inelegant, especially as I happened to select those two clues consecutively.

@Andrzej I didn't get this either, and though I eventually guessed at the explanation, I am not impressed by it. I have only ever heard the abbreviation STAT used in the context of sports statistics, or at least referring to specific numbers like maybe polling stats. I have never seen the short form used to refer to a class of statistic in the mathematical field of statistics. Maybe statisticians use it this way, but if so that's pretty niche.

@Dan I think I ordered that at Starbucks.

@Teresa I'm with Teresa on this one - the inclusion of a totally superfluous detail seems sloppy to me. But maybe if I were more fluent with that specific current usage I would feel differently.

@Erika This is fascinating. I can say though that growing up in America (and no, not in the 1920's) "lychee nut" was a very common term for it. And while it's self-evidently a fruit on the inside, from the outside its size and color do resemble a nut, thence no doubt the misnomer.

@Nora LOL yes it's confusing, and the Wikipedia entry makes it sound even more so! Of course orchestra musicians have no voice and just follow the conductor. But the conductor has to decide, as do soloists and (collectively) chamber musicians. And yes it gets confusing as meanings change over time. Notably Andante, literally "walking", was viewed in the 18th century as a 'fastish', moving tempo, which made Andantino, "a bit Andante", a bit slower; but by the 19th century and into the present Andante came to be viewed as "moderately slow", making Andantino *faster* than Andante. Got all that? Brahms even seemed to change his mind on this in the course of his lifetime, and already in the 19th century musicians complained that nobody knew what the heck Andantino meant. Some of these things are still actively debated. Meanwhile Lento sort of exists outside the standard Largo-Adagio-Andante-Allegro-Presto scale, and just means sort of generally "slow". So it doesn't really compare readily with other markings. Finally, of course all tempos are relative and subjective, and highly dependent on the written note values (8ths, 16ths, 32nds etc.), so the metronome ranges printed on metronomes or in the Wikipedia article are largely meaningless.

@Frank M I suppose it's a matter of semantics. Typically a theme weaves many of the answers together by their meaning around a common subject. Here it is about the actual construction/design of the grid, which I suppose I might call more a concept. So yeah, basically sorta kinda. ;-)

@Andrew F In this puzzle alone I see "Not learn one's lesson?" for SKIP CLASS and "Gentleman's agreement" for YES M'LADY as examples of idiom-clues which are deceptive but have natural and pleasing connections to the solutions. Just going back more or less randomly to last Saturday, "Private agreement?" for YES SIR, "Entry form?" for TRAVEL VISA, and "Common component of ranch dressing?" for STETSON HAT are all question mark clues with the sort of organic connection I'm talking about. Obviously there are countless other examples.

@Jane Wheelaghan Ironically, the name 'Niles' was almost certainly chosen for that character to be as pretentiously British-sounding as possible! But still a totally American reference, of course. If it makes you feel any better I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of doing your crossword puzzles!

@Steven M. The Mario references were hopeless for me (I at least eventually guessed that the second one was going to rhyme), but as a musician I got OCARINAS fairly readily - 'wind' puns for the crossword-friendly word OBOE are also fairly common. And took me a while to correct RuCKus as well.

@Julia Gerson Yes - add up to. A bit strained seems to me. I also didn't care for RESTS for "gets 40 winks"; 'rests' and 'sleeps' don't mean the same thing to me.

@Tim Yeah it took me a minute, but 'completing' is also a noun, a gerund. So 'completing a game quickly' can be a SPEED RUN the way 'walking the dog' is an outdoor activity. (Grammatically at least.) And I suspect SPEED RUN is actual gamer lingo, since so many video games now have the sandbox quality where you can elect to wander around in a leisurely way, or just try to get through ASAP.

@Divs Yeah 'birthday name' was a bit deceptive; 'birth day name' would be a fairer clue. PS yes, ORE is Oregon!

@Workingmom123 "Not fair"? How on earth would that be not fair? To whom?

@Steve L Nope. So close! Took me a while, I had "nuts" as an adjective. Just as well, that would have been too weird!

@Barry Ancona Thanks, I'm familiar with what the question marks mean, and with the difficulty of Friday puzzles. You can see my response below for just a few examples of excellent question-mark clues that are plenty tricky but also have the satisfying tonal connection I'm talking about. [PS 'albeit' is one word, but 'so be it' is not.]

@chris Good call. The online dictionary I checked does list 'siege' as a verb, but it does read to me like a mis-usage that has gradually become tolerated. (Which for a crossword is, of course, good enough.)

@Barry Ancona OK so the leap to repurpose 'tonal connection' to mean spelling three little words as one; now *that* is funny, and a damn sight more clever than those hinky clues. You must do crossword puzzles or something. Actually 'sol' and 'B' are indeed tones. Only 'it' ain't.

@Andrzej I imagine it's misspelled for commercial reasons (like just plain 'lite', or 'xtra' - or 'playdoh' for that matter.) Apparently it's a kind of cookie, but I'm American and I'd never heard of them either!

@Andrzej That's fascinating. I never connected the unusual English word canard with the common (and tasty) French one. But if it is indeed derived from it, I wonder how a duck came to mean a baseless rumor, in either English or Polish! The choice of 'fake news' is of course very topical, and plays slyly on its use nowadays to mean just about anything.

@Andrzej Wow, yes I remember that one, though not the date as I'm sure you all do. I suppose you could make a crossword commemorating that, but I fear it would be pretty dark.

@Bruce It's not the words I'm talking about that are obscure, it's the connection of the clues to the solutions. For ONCELER by contrast, the clue was totally straightforward and non-tricky, it's just an obscure reference that neither of us had ever heard of. (Apparently it's parsed ONCE-LER, not that that would have helped me any.)