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@Dylan Any instance of calling it American Sign Language, or ASL, seems to recognize it as a language. Crossword rules generally require coming up with some synonym for the word "language" in the clue if ASL is going to be the answer - "communication system" is as good a synonym as any, and it benefits from matching the clues around it.
oHTANI is a historically relevant baseball player who will probably go down as one of the all-time greats. That said, if the only way to fit his name in a crossword requires you to also include HOOHA, you should probably skip him and go with RUTH or BERRA.
@sotto voce Comments like this are what I need to read after a puzzle that frustrated me to no end. Sometimes I need to be reminded that there are people out there having the exact opposite experience from me, and that's ok; that's the whole point of there being so many people, right? Thanks for sharing your positive thoughts.
@Michael Spelling is part of crosswords. You could argue that pop culture and trivia is as well, but spelling is definitely part of the assignment. One of my high school English teachers told us to remember that Yoko Ono was Edgar Allen Poe's mother and we'd always be prepared for "Ono, Ma To Poe (ia)." I wish our home ec teachers had given us something for mushrooms; that was the one that I misspelled today.
Some Thursdays are brutal; this one was on the easier side. I don't think that's so bad a thing -- if every puzzle clobbered us, it would be monotonous. If every puzzle was extra, none would be. You need some C's and B's for those A 's to be special. I figured out the rebus gimmick on this one at THREE'S COMPANY, but still got stuck in the southeast corner. The three stacked rows with the Italian word, the rebus, and the Norse name were enough non-English things in a row to send me the the answer key. Frustrating. But I'm learning to appreciate the frustrating ones. They make the triumphs feel much more triumphant.
@Cody I'll chip in with some grumbling, since you asked. This puzzle depended way too much on names that just felt like filler (ALBA, LENA, SIMU, TINAS, SLADE, NED, IAN) for my tastes... And any time you see EELED in a puzzle, it's a red flag. I refuse to believe any crossword author would put EELED into a puzzle except out of sheer desperation.
@Marco If we all ate like crosswords, Oreos would be one of the four main food groups and eels would be on the verge of extinction.
Hard as nails, made me remember what it felt like when I was just starting this crossword hobby and I was sure Saturdays were not going to be for me. Sometimes these puzzles make me feel like I'm a genius; sometimes they remind me that I'm not...
@Megan This. Literally the meaning of the word is "hook" in French - I'm surprised that anyone who knows the word "crochet" enough to include it in a crossword puzzle would make that mistake.
@Nate G I'm old as dirt and agree with you completely - this one had a couple of clues that were beyond the usual Tuesdays. The crossing of HOLST and SITSKI put this one cleanly outside of my reach. Maybe not a Friday puzzle, but Wednesday at least.
@Mikaela and Ava You should be proud of yourselves! Sundays are always an endurance challenge, if nothing else, and Saturdays are just beastly. You should go into the week ahead feeling ten feet tall and bulletproof :)
For years, I've apparently been mixing up the words roué and roux. I was very confused why the base of my gumbo was considered degenerate. I'm glad I'm learning it here instead of spelling it wrong in my memoirs...
@The X-Phile I read somewhere that intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
Whenever I finish a puzzle and it seems easier than usual, I assume that I'm either getting better at crosswords or I'm just particularly smart today - especially on a Saturday, when I'm usually caught up on sleep. I can't imagine any way to judge how hard these things are objectively, in a way that controls for the undeniable fact that somedays I'm a lot derpier than others. This one felt very hard at the start, but after getting a few word in place, it came together quickly - except the top left corner, the crossing of 1A and 1D. I love a good rum cake, but never heard a name for them other than rum cakes, and Ms Rexha was a stranger to me. Guess I'll have to listen to her work today so I'll be ready for next time.
@Nancy J. I must admit I did fill in the puzzle with just the U's, but I'm not sure what would have been a better option? I think trying to put a rebus with "U / GLOVE" would have been awkwardly small on my phone screen (and godawful small on a hardcopy newspaper). As I get older and increasingly less comfortable with font sizes on my phone, I appreciate being able to solve rebuses with just the one letter. It lets me save my squinting for receipts and prescription medicine bottles and such...
@Adin I never thought I would write this sentence, but honestly, I think this would have worked better as a rebus. Gonna go wash my mouf out with rubbing alcohol now...
@HeathieJ I had WAIST (as in waist watchers) crossing HAA and could not figure out where my mistake was without help... It was HAR all along. I guess that means this puzzle was too HARd for me...
Felt like a really tough Tuesday, but somehow finished under average time - another piece of evidence that subjective feelings are not too helpful when it comes to rating how hard these puzzles are objectively. The asymmetry theme was awfully clever - I appreciate it and I'm grateful that I didn't need to figure it out as an additional puzzle to finish the puzzle itself. (Making us figure out the theme seems like it should be reserved for Thursdays.)
Went quickly and smoothly for me except for two letters... NEEDLE_R_P. Never caught Das Rheingold (wasn't he in the Brat Pack?) and they didn't offer Latin at my high school, so nothing to do but guess words that sound right after needle. Trip? Trap? Grip? Prop? Crap? Eventually I gave up and looked at the answer key, but it's fine; Fridays are supposed to be hard, and getting all but two letters is better than a lot of days. I'll get you next time, NEEDLEDROP.
Sundays seem to have more variety in their difficulty level than other days of the week - I always find them challenging just because they're smaller on my phone screen, but sometimes the clues feel more Tuesday than Friday. This was much more Friday. The hard ones all felt "fair," more or less - I don't really like it when they include a gratuitous "THE" in an answer (I was sure the answer was AFL-CIO), but it's not like we don't see it fairly often. CHIASMUS is a hard word, but I happened to know it; PANANG doesn't seem unfair compared to that, even though I didn't know it. Surely more people have eaten Thai food than read books on rhetorical devices. So it was tough and I want to complain, but it's not like they did anything wrong or like the NYT Crossword is never supposed to be hard, so I guess I can't complain. But I'm definitely looking forward to Monday.
All five of this author's puzzles have been much too hard for me. Finally, I got around to reading the poem... And now I don't want to be one of the thin men of Haddam, imagining golden birds and easy puzzles. The hard puzzles are around the feet of the women about me.
This was a bear - in all the right ways. I must have fallen for every misdirect, including OSCAR and TREE LEAVES. Twenty minutes longer than my average. Saturdays are for learning, and there was a lot to learn in this one.
I got stuck at ROMe/ETTe in place of ROMA/ETTA... I'm not sure how one could get unstuck from there other than how I did (looking at the answer key). Other than that, an easy-breezy Friday.
@Bob I felt like Zork was pretty fair - you'll never guess it if you don't know 80's pc games, and it'll be pretty familiar if you do. TSENG, KIROV, and KLEE are probably similarly difficult for folks who don't know Swiss artists, Russian ballet, or pro golf. Any of those would be completely awful for a Monday or Tuesday, probably questionable for a Wednesday... But we're supposed to cuss on Thursdays, right?
I thought this was a very charming puzzle. Got stuck on lots of clues, but eventually figured them out. Found a few names of people and things that I'll have to look up and learn about, and that's good - Saturdays are for learning. 10/10. If every puzzle was as nice as this one, I'd forget how to make complaints in comments sections in a month or two.
@Isabeau it feels almost intentional - it would have been easy enough to use the phrase "fiber art" and avoid the complaints altogether. Calling it needlecraft doesn't make it easier or harder; it just annoys the crocheters. And if the constructor (or the editors, for that matter) consulted even a single crocheter, they would know that this was going to annoy the crocheters.
A truly delightful experience with this one. The answers at the top were too tough for me; I only had a very few words filled as I went down the clues, until the very bottom, 59A, 60A, and 61A... Then 44D and 40D jumped out, then it was a smooth climb right back up to the top, and everything fell into place perfectly. Things looked a little hopeless, but persistence paid off and it all worked out. A great lesson to learn again first thing in the morning; I'll carry a little resilience and optimism through the rest of my day now.
@Chris I thought it was rather tough for a Wednesday. Between you feeling it was on the easy side and Barry judging it a good fit, we seem to have covered all the bases. Good job, team!
@SP I struggled with this puzzle - both the dog clue and the balcony clue were beyond my grasp, and there were a lot of other places that had me scowling. Your comment made it all better. Absolutely disgraceful pun. Thanks for that.
@Barry Ancona Even if you have a dictionary that includes CASITA (mine sure doesn't), I'm very impressed if it includes INA, ASA, BRAGG, EMI, IVES, and L'EGGS. It must be at least as thick as a WII. Not that there's any rule about dictionary inclusion as some prerequisite to being in a crossword puzzle or anything, but I understand the frustrations when we occasionally see a square where, say, ELBRUS and KEMOSABE cross (as they did last Sunday).
@NMarie I hadn't ever heard of Emil. That corner clearly needed more work - rarely do we see the columnist just go ahead and give us all the words to fill the whole southwest corner of a grid instead of just one or two of the tricky ones. It seemed like a tacit confirmation that the editors should have spent a little more time over there. Emil Jannings died 2 Jan 1950, per Wikipedia, exactly 75 years ago, and was best known for a film from 1930 starting Marlene Dietrich. I'm guessing that there aren't a lot of people in 2025 who remember him unless they're big Dietrich fans (or big haters of Nazi sympathizers). Also per Wikipedia, there are several hundred other articles that start with Emil (searching for "prefix:'Emil'" gives a list of them), so it seems like they could have picked from maybe better options.
@CCNY Nigella was my only Google -- it seems awkward enough to get a tEXT in public that I concluded her surname must be LAWtON. Obviously it's much more awkward if her last name is LAWSON...
@Jane Wheelaghan The trick is to go heavy peanut butter, light jelly. It helps if you put the dab of jelly right in the middle of the bread, too; you don't want it dripping out the sides of the sandwich and getting all over the place anywhere, but especially in a lunchbox. Kids might complain about crusts on the bread, but for helping keep the jelly contained, they're quite functional. If you're making one for immediate consumption, you might make different choices (I always toast the bread, myownself), but you can definitely make a PBANDJ that will hold up to the demands of a lunchbox satisfactorily.
@Jordan It's not fair to say you're wrong here; you wanted to enjoy the puzzle and the author wanted you to enjoy the puzzle and you didn't. But it's also kind of like saying a plate of cookies is bad because you didn't like it when you can see a bunch of other folks in the room who clearly did. I found this puzzle too hard for me to complete without help - I'm here in the comments looking for hints before I open up the answer key. But I worked on it for half an hour, got frustrated, went to bed, and made more progress when I woke up this morning - and every word I figured out this morning felt really good. This is pretty standard for me on Saturdays; Saturdays are like walnut cookies. Not as enjoyable for me as Wednesday chocolate chips, but I know what I'm getting into before I take the first bite, and sometimes they're pretty ok.
@Tom S. I thought YELICH was ok - I rarely watch a game of baseball these days, but even catching Sportscenter or PTI a few days a week was enough to put the word in the back of my head somewhere, and it only took a few crossing letters to let me fill it in confidently. Confident compared to a truly unknown word like AGOUTIS, at least. Confidence on Saturdays is supposed to be rare, right?
Worse than the animation not working, the wordplay column's hidden clue answers didn't work (so I needed to open up the whole answer key to find out it was APIA, SAMOA, rather than AVIA, crossing SABOR rather than SAVOR). The technical performance of the puzzle and the Wordplay column seems to be on the decline the past few months. I hope y'all can get it together again soon.
@Jim GUIDO was the only clue I got the first time through -- I had to Google nearly all the rest, so I balanced you out. :)
@Xword Junkie NAY was so far from front of mind for me that I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out what a GAh ANTHEM could be. Facepalm.
@Dan In theory, almost anything can be a man's name - the late musical genius sometimes known as Prince made it a point to pick something pretty far out of the norm to be his name, and I'm just glad no one has made us enter that as a rebus yet. But Tre is not so uncommon a first name; Wikipedia has a whole list of notable people named Tre: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tre_(given_name" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tre_(given_name</a>)
@CaptainQuahog snarkiness aside, it might be well-received if the Times ran two puzzles every day -- one that followed a basic crossword rule of "one letter to a square" and one that considered that to be more of a suggestion. Even the authors might like it if they knew they could write a rebus puzzle without a sizable group of people hating it. I can handle the rebuses after a few months of practice now (and I'm grateful that they only require me generally to put the first letter in). I just want puzzles that don't use HEROIZE. Bleagh.
I've been doing this thing in the app long enough that I wasn't surprised when the gimmick paid itself off by doing an animation that didn't require any input from me at all -- once I had all the letters in place (transcribed from the answer key), the app just turned the dials around on its own and spelled JACKPOT, very pleased with itself. But it did make me wonder how underwhelming this sort of puzzle must be for the print subscriber. Do they even print the crossword in the paper anymore? Doing the NYT crossword in ink used to be a joke that people would make about an intellectual flexing; I can't imagine someone doing it in real life with puzzles like this. I can't imagine anyone would want to.
Tough puzzle, but it was a clever theme, and Thursdays aren't supposed to be Mondays. The Tricky Clues in the column, though - passing over that whole southwest corner like NOBRADAY and LEONORA are easy-peasy, and giving us a hint for THE. That was tough.
The constructor note could have mentioned another connection to Mr Foley with the clue referencing "Cactus Jack," but I guess he tortured the crossword audience today enough with the pro wrestling trivia... As one of the apparently few crossword fans who watched WWE occasionally in the 1998-2005 era, the PEOPLE'S ELBOW was a really helpful 12-letter start for this tough puzzle.
@Passion for Peaches I agree with the incorrect and bad cluing part; "fiend" and ANIMAL are about as unrelated as any two words I could think of. But why pejorative?
@cameron I counted twelve - but that's including RFK and Lenin. In context, they seem more like geographic referents than personal names in this puzzle. I appreciate the rotational symmetry of this puzzle; the double-scrabble entries tend to mirror each other almost perfectly, and the double-Natick squares where two obscure names cross do as well. Tough puzzle, but Saturdays are supposed to be. And you gotta give credit to the author for crossing nuns' VOWS with wine, and especially SEXTing with FORCE CHOKE.
@lucky13 What a great bonus lesson for today. I haven't learned this much French since last time I read a Dave Barry book. (He also taught me the incredibly useful Spanish sentence, "Camarero, hay una mosca en mi sopa.")
@Seward Parker I really liked that one, too. Conversely, SOTHERE is one of my least favorite answers of the year. Partly because UNS can stand for Unified Network Services (which, if a network is carrying your data, seems close enough for me) and NOT HERE is no less nonsensical than SO THERE.
@Xword Junkie HAR is also questionable at best. It may be slightly less questionable than HAA, but you're not finding either one of them in the OED (at least, not in the sense the clue was looking for here).
@Nancy J. That one confused the daylights out of me; I came to the comments to complain that OMA is not an interjection that I ever heard of. Thank you for making it make sense :)
@William EMEKA Okafor should have been an easy fill for me; I heard the name on Sportscenter a million times, and Okafor is clearly written on his uniform. But I had no idea how to spell it - Omega? Amaka? Those ESPN anchors never spelled it out for me, the jerks. Saturdays are for learning. I'll be able to write a properly spelled place card for Mr. Okafor now, if he ever comes for a GALA or a FÊTE (or even a GORP).