Welcome back to Puzzle Pieces. Spoilers ahead! In this weekly column, I look at our Weekender crossword, highlighting some of my favourite clues, explaining how the puzzle’s theme works and sharing a note from the week’s constructor.
I also dive into the workings of a selected clue from our Weekender Cryptic crossword. My goal is to introduce more Globe readers to how our crossword puzzles work and to celebrate the people who make them.
Note that I use CAPS for letters that end up in the grid and [square brackets] for clues.
Favourite moments
Our Sept. 26 Weekender, That’s Such a Cliché, is our latest from Toronto constructor Carina da Rosa, whose cluing style never fails to delight.
Where do you stand in the great debate referenced at 27A, [Controversial butter tart additions]? I’m Team RAISINS, all the way. Many sources trace the first butter tart recipe to the “Filling for Tarts” instructions on page 88 of the The Women’s Auxiliary of the Royal Victoria Hospital Cookbook printed in Barrie, Ont., in 1900. Among the four ingredients? Currants. Are dried currants pretty much just RAISINS? Well, no, but the anti-RAISINS people sure aren’t arguing for currants, either. If the earliest recipe calls for dried fruit, I’m all for it.
I digress.
The word “PJS” often shows up in crosswords, as it does in 77A this week, often clued with reference to nighttime or sleepover apparel. I like Carina’s fresh angle, [Matching Xmas duds for the fam, maybe], and the fact that the abbreviations Xmas and fam are pointing the solver to an abbreviated answer.
Are you familiar with the [Numbers game that sounds like two Mattel dolls], at 18D? That’s KENKEN, a game we feature in our daily print paper. Invented by a Japanese math teacher in 2004, it offers a different challenge from crosswords, sort of like Sudoku but with arithmetic operations. Give it a try!
Finally, at 58D, the clue might trip you up if you’re reading too quickly: [It helps when doing sift work?] That’s sift work, not shift work, a clever description of what you do with a SIEVE.
Breaking down the theme
It was a bit of a journey to get to the puzzle theme you see before you. It started with Carina’s idea for some kind of “eh”-based puzzle, for a little Canadian flair.
First, we looked at a list of phrases whose endings were simply variations on the eh sound, like yogurt parfait and anchors aweigh. But we wanted a goofier transformation in the theme entries.
Next, we explored adding eh sounds to familiar phrases, making things like men are from marseille. Then we hit on the idea of using TAKE OFF, EH as the revealer entry, and looked for ways to play with removing an eh sound. We couldn’t find enough examples with differently spelled eh sounds … but then Carina had the great idea to just remove the letter that sounds like “eh,” i.e., the letter A. So simple, yet so full of funny possibilities.
She came back with the hilarious theme set you now see in the solved grid, each entry a familiar phrase with a letter A removed. The key is in the revealer clue for TAKE OFF EH at 115A: [Catchphrase for SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie … or a phonetic hint to the starred clues].
My favourites:
- 31A: [*“Refrain from shaking R2-D2”?] – DON’T ROCK THE BOT
- 46A: [*How an ancient Roman might turn down a request for a mid-month appointment?] – I’M ALL OUT OF IDES
- 82A: [*Totally amateurish triage centres?] – MICKEY MOUSE ERS
- 100A: [*“Please excuse my clever quips”?] – SORRY FOR THE WIT
A note from constructor Carina da Rosa
I come at this puzzle with only love, never judgment of anyone’s speech habits. I, too, have been known to utter the occasional “eh” at the end of a sentence, which my British husband enjoys pointing out.
The cutting room floor is littered with themers on this one, from back when we tried to make it a homophone/addition puzzle. I’ll leave you with these drafts:
- SLEEPING IN THE BUFFET: [Getting some zzz’s during an all-you-can-eat meal?]
- VITAMIN BAE: [Lover that makes sure you get your riboflavin?]
- SHARPEI DRESSERS: [Wardrobe specialists for wrinkly dogs?]
Cryptic clue of the week
If you’re new to cryptics, a great place to start is Fraser Simpson’s article How to solve The Globe’s cryptic crossword. It won’t help you with this week’s clue, though. This clue uses a mechanism you don’t see in every cryptic, and rarely more than once in a puzzle. Not because it’s hard, but because it’s a bit of one-trick pony. But it’s a good trick.
From our Sept. 26 Weekender Cryptic, let’s look at 20A: [Vacant-looking Lassie guide mentioned by Spooner (6-4)].
Once you see “Spooner,” there’s no sense pursuing any other ideas. It’s a spoonerism.
William Archibald Spooner was a reverend known for verbal slips in which he swapped the first sounds or syllables of a phrase, to great comic effect. A cryptic spoonerism clue does exactly that.
Because “mentioned by Spooner” is part of the wordplay and appears at the end of the clue, the definition is very likely at the start: “vacant-looking.” We need to rack our brains for a phrase that means “vacant-looking” but, when it’s spoonerized, gives us “Lassie guide.”
This turns out to be straightforward, because we’re not looking for synonyms (collie leader? dog steer?) – we’re using the given words directly. Switch the first sounds of “Lassie” and “guide” and you get the answer: GLASSY-EYED.