WSJ Contest – December 9, 2016

 

Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Word Search”—Dave Sullivan’s write-up

Howdy! Today we are looking for a language. Given the title, my initial assumption is that we would find words from that language in the theme entries. Let’s see if that pans out:

• 17a. [Every governor of California, while in office], SACRAMENTAN – do you become from a place just while serving in office there? To the locals here in Vermont, we will always be “flatlanders” as we moved here about 5 years ago.
• 20a. [Business consultant’s phrase], CHANGE IS HARD – I had “good” for “hard” at first.
• 27a. [Imprisoned], THROWN IN JAIL
• 44a. [Do as the Romans do?], SPEAK ITALIAN – “drive too fast and smoke cigarettes” didn’t fit
• 52a. [“MADtv” alum who played a police chief on “Sleepy Hollow”], ORLANDO JONES – the only Orlandos I know are Tony, Bloom and Furioso. Oh, and the one in the center of Florida.
• 58a. [More than mattered], WAS A BIG DEAL

So pretty quickly along my “word search,” I hit upon the entries highlighted above: RAMEN, GEISHA (nice find, btw!) NINJA, AKITA, DOJO and WASABI, all words we’ve inherited from the Japanese language. Not the hardest meta in the world, but some nice hiding places for these Japanese words.

A few notable clues I liked: [Jack up at night, once] for PAAR, [Pat around a wheel] for SAJAK and [The Dutch like to smoke it] for EEL. OTOH, the less I think about ALANA Thompson (“Honey Boo Boo”), the better!