The Globe and Mail crosswords: Breaking down the Weekender’s ‘We Are *Not* the Same’ crossword, cryptic clues and more | Canada Voices

Welcome back to Puzzle Pieces, our weekly column where I examine the latest Weekender crossword, share a note from the constructor(s), and dissect a clue from Fraser Simpson’s Weekender Cryptic. Throughout the column, I’ll be using the standard crossword conventions of putting entries in CAPITAL LETTERS and clues in [square brackets].

We Are *Not* the Same is our latest Weekender by Will Nediger of London, Ont. Will is not only a talented, prolific crossword constructor and editor (including filling in for me when I’m constructing), but also a champion speed solver whose times would blow your mind (think two or three minutes for a hard 15×15 onscreen crossword). Read all about him in this feature from last April’s Globe and Mail.

Favourite moments in today’s crossword

A great thing about Will’s puzzles is his ability to find fresh cluing angles for familiar entries. At 8D, for example, ARIA is not just an opera solo or highlight, but a [Track on an opera singer’s album]. I love that extra bit of colour.

Two clues later, at 10D, EYES is evocatively clued as [Only features of a cartoon character visible in the dark, often]. I can almost hear that little blink-blink sound effect against those white ovals on a black screen. It doesn’t make the clue harder or easier, just more interesting and fun.

I also can’t resist a good misdirect clue, which is often indicated by a question mark. At 21A, [Standing order?] is not some pre-approved instruction to your bank or pharmacy. Rather, the answer is PLEASE RISE: an order to stand.

At 80D I learned that OOLONG TEA is a [Drink whose name means “black dragon”]. And I enjoyed seeing TSN in the grid, as well as clue references to The Great Canadian Baking Show and Margaret Laurence’s The STONE Angel.

Breaking down today’s theme

Today’s Weekender has a straightforward theme with a clever execution. Will identified four pairs of entries that seem like they should be synonyms, but aren’t:

• CRASH COURSE and COLLISION COURSE
• SPEECH THERAPY and TALK THERAPY
• LEADING LADY and FIRST LADY
• TECHNICAL CHALLENGES and TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

Ah, the quirks of the English language! I had fun discovering these in the grid, guided by the parenthetical comment in the second clue of each pair: “(not a synonym of [the entry above it], surprisingly).”

But Will did more here than just find some interesting pairs of phrases. First, all of these entries have an odd number of letters, which allowed him to place the pairs on top of each other in the 21×21 grid, perfectly aligned down the middle. Did you notice the grid’s left-right (mirror) symmetry? That’s somewhat unusual in crosswords, which are more often “rotationally” symmetrical.

Second, and this is the real feat, stacking long entries significantly limits the words that can cross them. Will could have spaced out the theme pairs for more flexibility in the crossing entries, but that would have been much less elegant. Instead, he stacked them directly on top of one another and yet still filled the Down crossings with fair, gettable words (and he wrote easier clues for those that might be a little tougher).

This theme breaks a cardinal rule of crossword grids: no dupes allowed. You can’t have COURSE in one place and COURSE again in another (let alone right on top of each other); it’s just not done. Unless, of course, it’s in service of a great theme.

A note from our constructor

“I’m in a Discord server about crosswords where people like to share ‘double-doubles’ – not the Tim Hortons orders, but pairs of two-word phrases where the first words of each phrase are synonyms and the second words of each phrase are synonyms, but the phrases as a whole aren’t synonyms (like BOOTY CALL and BUTT DIAL). I was tickled by the idea of having phrases that seem even more like they should be synonymous, because one of the pairs of words aren’t just synonyms, but are the exact same word. I decided to stack the pairs of phrases together to accentuate the effect, which made the grid super hard to fill, and there are some trickier answers than usual, but hopefully it’s still fun!”

Cryptic clue of the week

Last week we looked at a clue that required us to anagram some words. From this week’s Weekender Cryptic, I’ve chosen one that uses a different mechanism: the container.

At 18A, we have [Chemistry class topic is catching on (4)]. I love this clue because its surface meaning is so clear and plausible. As cryptic solvers, however, we know the surface meaning is a mere distraction, because only some of those words provide a straight definition of the answer – found either at the beginning (chemistry, chemistry class, chemistry class topic?) or at the end (topic is catching on, is catching on, catching on, on??).

Notice the word “catching.” Words like grabbing, surrounding, holding, and carrying often indicate that one element goes inside another. So it’s a safe bet that the latter half of this clue is the wordplay part, and it doesn’t get much more straightforward than this: “is catching on” gives us IS with ON inside it, or I(ON)S. And IONS is indeed a four-letter chemistry class topic.