WSJ Contest – Friday, December 2, 2016

Marie Kelly’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Chain Letters”—Dave Sullivan’s write-up

WSJ Contest- 12/2/16 – “Chain Letters”

This week, I guess rather appropriately given the season, we are looking for a noted retail chain. The theme answers are easy to identify as their clues all have an enumeration in parentheses following them; however, the clues themselves offer no other insight into the entry:

• 17a. [Start of the chain (5)], ITINERANT BEGGAR – so the clue is actually the entry itself. Here I was thinking “hobo”, “vagrant”, or “vagabond”, at first
• 28a. [Continuation of the chain (7)], GO BESERK – my first stab here was “lose it”
• 32a. [Continuation of the chain (6)], FROM BONN – “German” seemed the only possible answer here; it was probably at this point that I realized the numbers in the clues likely referred to the length of the word (or phrase) hinted at by the entry
• 42a. [Continuation of the chain (6)], MUTILATE – “destroy” and “rip up” came to mind, but neither were 6 letters
• 44a. [Continuation of the chain (7)], PARASITES – “leeches” was my first thought and happily 7 letters long
• 58a. [End of the chain (5)], WHERE THE HEART IS – “home” seemed the obvious answer, but short a letter if I was correct on my theory about the numbers in the theme clues

To “chain” these entries together, I first wondered if the end of one entry could begin the next? Well, “German” was my starting point as my most assured answer, so I wondered if the entry before or after that could share at least a letter with it. To mutilate something could also mean to “mangle” it (6 letters!), so I tentatively considered those last three letters as part of the common chain. From there, I got the rest of them:

• An “itinerant beggar” is a TRAMP
• To “go berserk” is to RAMPAGE
• “From Bonn” is GERMAN
• To “mutilate” is to MANGLE
• “Parasites” are LEECHES
• “Where the heart is” is CHEST

String them together and you see the shared letters, and more importantly, the letters left over that belong only to one entry:

TRAMPAGERMANGLEECHEST

What’s left over is indeed a retail chain, TARGET, and our meta solution. An excellent meta, with lots of nice interconnected parts and takes on the meaning of “chain.”

I do have one nit to pick, and that’s the clue for 31d. [Muay Thai weapons], which ended up being KNEE. (Muay Thai is a type of martial art, that according to this page, uses the entire body as a weapon.) So certainly a knee is one of these weapons, but only one in the singular. I did enjoy the juxtaposition of LOVE YA and YUKFESTS in the lower quadrant as well as some nice misdirecting clues such as [Expert at spinning] for SPIDER, [Extra offering] (a “masked capital”) for GUM and [Boxer’s warning] for GRR. I have to also admit confusion over the clue [Attic vowels] for ETAS, as I’m curious about connection to the Greek vowel η here. (Later, I see that Attic Greek was the language of ancient Attica, which included Athens.)