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Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Chemical Changes” — Laura’s review
This week, we’re looking for a famous chemist.
WSJ Contest – 2.26.21 – Solution
We have five themers that seem to be silly phrases made up of two words, and the last one has a parenthetical hint:
- [17a: Letting a fellow geometry student copy a measurement?]: RADIUS LEND
- [21a: Person who’s figured out the properties of a physics particle?]: BOSON SOLVER
- [37a: 1990s talk show rerun watched on your lunch hour?]: NOON ARSENIO
- [58a: Legendary player of a party board game?]: CRANIUM ICON
- [63a: Truckful of supplies for a circus owner? (You’ll need to reuse one here)]: BARNUM LOAD
Turn out, each themer is made up of the names of two chemical elements, each with one letter changed (hence the puzzle’s title, and note the reused one at the end):
RADIUS LEND == RADIUM LEAD
BOSON SOLVER == BORON SILVER
NOON ARSENIO == NEON ARSENIC
CRANIUM ICON == URANIUM IRON
BARNUM LOAD == BARIUM LEAD
Take the changed letters, and they spell in order MARIE CURIE, who is a famous chemist and our answer.
Was a famous chemist. And physicist, too. Which partially explains the two Nobel Prizes.
LauraB: My fellow Fiends may be interested in knowing that LauraB is featured in the Bookend column of the March/April issue of American Libraries, the news magazine of the American Library Association. Here’s a direct link to the article: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2021/03/01/clues-you-can-use-librarian-crosswords/