Another Saturday, another big day in Globe and Mail crosswords. Welcome back to Puzzle Pieces, where I dive into our Saturday puzzles and explain what the heck is going on. As always, spoilers ahead, and CAPS are for grid entries and [square brackets] are for clues.
Favourite moments in Saturday’s crossword
In the Sept. 19 Weekender crossword, Wait for It, constructor Will Nediger gives us some great misdirect clues that need no explanation once you see the answers, but that are just too clever not to mention:
- 55D: [Brand with soft launched products?] – NERF
- 86D: [Good competitor?] – EVIL
- 95D: [Person who might come crawling back?] – SWIMMER
I also really enjoyed 109A’s [Where’s ___? (site that tracks $5 bills, so-named because they depict Laurier)]. I’d never heard of the Where’s WILLY website, and I hardly ever have cash anymore, but I still think this is a great discovery.
A clue I hope you took notice of is at 123D, [Apt word formed by shifting every letter of “irk” 13 spots ahead in the alphabet]. How does one even think to try to figure that out, let alone actually do it? Indeed, 13 letters after I is V, 13 letters after R (looping back to the start) is E, and 13 letters after K is X, giving a perfect instruction for VEX. That’s. Just. Wild.
(And I very much left this puzzle singing “on which we used to RELYyyy …” thanks to 91D’s clue, [Verb rhymed with “guy” in the Family Guy theme song]. Thanks for the earworm.)
Breaking down the theme
What amazes me about Will (among 27 or so other things) is how every time he sends me an idea for a crossword theme, it’s something completely different from the last one. When I brainstorm, I tend to get a little stuck on one kind of idea, but somehow Will’s brain is able to twist and turn like nobody’s business.
This theme hinges on the revealer entry right across the middle at 68A: [What to do with this puzzle’s starred entries, in the bottom half of the grid]. The answer is PICK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF.
(As Will mentions in his note below, there’s a particular little thrill crossword constructors get in discovering a familiar phrase is exactly 21 letters long, the standard width of a weekend-sized grid. You immediately ask yourself what theme you could build around it.)
Then there are five theme entries starting in the top half of the grid, and each one breaks at a certain point and continues in a new slot in the bottom of the grid. Their unifying feature is that the spot where each one breaks is at a string of circled letters that spells a word that means “leave off,” and you need to literally PICK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF down below.
- 22A and122A: FEARLESS TAY/LOR’S VERSION
- 24A and 105A: THOU SHALT/NOT KILL
- 35A and 120A: FOR QUIT/E SOME TIME
- 39A and 90A: CHRISTOP/HER WREN
- 50A and 103A: SHARES T/HE WEALTH
A note from the constructor, Will Nediger
Now that I’m making a lot of 21×21 puzzles, nothing perks up my ears like hearing a 21-letter phrase in the wild. PICK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF immediately struck me as crossword theme material, and I originally wanted to have phrases cut off after the letters Y-O-U, but it turns out there just aren’t that many phrases that have Y-O-U that don’t literally use the word YOU. So I hit upon the idea of using synonyms for “leave off” instead.
Cryptic clue of the week
I’ve been trying to cover a variety of cryptic clue types in this segment each week. This time: the clue type that’s both the easiest to solve, in my opinion, and the one I somehow miss most often, the hidden word clue.
I think I overlook “hiddens” (as they’re called in the biz) because I’m so conditioned to hunting for complex charades and treating every word as a possible cryptic indicator. I seem to always forget my own rule of thumb: “If a cryptic clue feels impossible because I can’t figure out what any of the words are doing, it’s probably a hidden.” (Catchy, I know.)
Let’s look at the clue at 20D of our Sept. 19 Weekender Cryptic: [Outstanding part of making witnesses tell a recollection (7)].
My brain immediately starts to overthink it. Could “outstanding part” mean taking outer letters? Which part could “part of making” be pointing to: ma, makin, akin? Is “witnesses” sees or spots? Does “recollection” signal a reversal?
Nope, it’s much simpler. “Part of making” is the hidden-word indicator, telling us to look for a string of letters embedded in the words that follow. Other common indicators include “some,” “somewhat,” “seen in,” “a stretch from,” and even just “in.”
So our answer is hidden in “witnesses tell a recollection.” STELLAR means “outstanding,” which is the definition at the start of the clue. So simple, so pure, so devious.
Remember, if this all still feels like mumbo jumbo to you, check out Fraser Simpson’s article How to solve The Globe’s cryptic crossword for a really good primer.