As a result, it felt to me like I solved four smaller crosswords. Your gateways from the northwest and southeast corners were just two squares each, and the central black square nearly isolated the other two corners as well. That was the case in this week’s Post Puzzler, a 72/33 gem from Jeffrey Harris. All-over interlock is the signature feature of an American crossword grid that distinguishes it from the British-style cryptic grid.īut even grids with all-over interlock can sometimes feel like you’re effectively solving at least two mini-puzzles, as the black squares can be arranged so that you have few passageways connecting various sections of the puzzle. No man is an island, nor is any section of a crossword grid that follows the basic convention of “all-over interlock.” This is the standard that says every white square has to feed both an Across and a Down answer. Jeffrey Harris’s Washington Post crossword, “The Post Puzzler No. You can click Oxford Dictionaries’ “more example sentences” links to view some examples of this word in use. Pussyfoot Longpants is actually my Bond Girl name. The 9-letter Down answers in the non-theme fill work well together. (I had not forgotten YMA, ENOL, UNIATE, OCA, ELL and ESS, and NYALA.) Just call me a Terrible Crosswordese AMNESIAC. Anyway, given the regular Maleskan use, presumably I merely blacked out all prior knowledge of the word, which I must’ve encountered in plenty of ’80s crosswords. and literally gasped when I saw that ANELE was parked right at 1-Across. (It was also used 33 times by Maleska’s constructors, 1975-1993.) I clicked through to look at the 2001 Weds. And yet! It has been in the NYT puzzle four previous times in the Shortz era, most recently on a Wednesday (!) in 2011. I didn’t recognize and it needed all the crossings. Do iguanas stick their tongues out like snakes flick theirs? Not fond of the “one who” and “his,” which lend a certain humanity to our reptile.Īncient crosswordese, I presume-it’s gotta be, right?-strikes with 32a. And I had a handful of Scowl-o-Meter moments as it is, so additional constraints would have caused crankiness. I reckon that AL is too common and too useful to be barred from a 21×21 without markedly coarsening the grid. When there’s a theme involving a particular letter combination, one hopes that said combination will not appear elsewhere in the puzzle. McCoy tried to come up with a theme adding AL to book titles, and had to widen his search to regular phrases to come up with a workable theme set. I like the base phrase, spring fling, though. There’s nothing like “a SW German city” to really liven up a crossword, am I right, folks? The “Aladdin” title means “AL” is “added in” to form each theme answer: NY Times crossword solution, 6 1 14 “Aladdin”
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