meta
hello and welcome to episode #738 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, “All Over The Map”. for week 4 of guest constructor month at mgwcc, we have a puzzle from brooke husic, who challenges us to find “what I used for my road trip around the country”. all right. what are the theme answers? well, i don’t know. there are no long answers in the grid; there are a handful of 8s and that’s it. nothing is marked with a * or otherwise overtly thematic. maybe the only clue that ties into a road trip theme is {Silas ___ Highway (Connecticut route named after an American revolutionary)} DEANE, which could’ve just been clued for the person and not the highway. i guess {Pick-up places} BUS STOPS maybe also, though probably “road trip” implies use of one’s own vehicle rather than riding a bus.
i had the singular experience of solving this puzzle (though not the meta, which i have yet to crack) while seated next to brooke husic in the judges’ room at boswords, where i had just met brooke in person for the first time. she’s as delightful in person as you would expect based on both her puzzles and her co-hosting at podcasts like crossnerds and tournaments like lollapuzzoola. but it didn’t make solving the meta any easier, as i remain quite stuck. let’s go over some notable features of the grid.
first of all, the lack of long answers (and the plethora of short and medium-length answers) in the 78-word grid leads me to suspect that there are a whole bunch of theme answers, maybe on the order of ten. we just have to figure out what they are.
there are a lot of one- and two-letter “words” in the entries: WHERE R U, IN-EAR, SEVEN AM, AS OF, OB-GYNS, DADS-TO-BE, ARC DE… well, okay, maybe not that many. but enough to catch my eye. the title and instructions certainly suggest a map of the united states, and the state postal abbreviations are fertile ground for a meta, but other than IN(diana) and DE(laware), the two-letter fragments in the answers aren’t state abbreviations. i suppose the “over” in the title might suggest looking in the grid square above some particularly noteworthy set of letters, but i don’t know which letters those might be.
overall, there are a lot of acronyms/abbreviations. i definitely don’t know what to make of that, other than it probably suggests a highly constrained grid. there are also, it must be noted, many S’s in the grid: 29 total, which is more than you’d expect for a 15×15 puzzle; none of the other letter counts seem anomalously high or low.
okay, i might as well try combining two of the ideas i’ve already mentioned, which is state postal abbreviations and looking at the letters right above those. that would at least be a plausible mechanism and it could lead to a grid this constrained without any particularly long answers required.
the problem is i already don’t know what to do with IN-EAR, which contains IN and NE overlapping plus AR later on with a black square over the R. hmm.
okay, this is definitely something: all eight of the 5-letter entries in the grid, including IN-EAR, begin and end with state postal abbreviations:
- {Like some headphones} IN-EAR.
- {First of Rome’s “Five Good Emperors”} NERVA. i knew this from studying roman history way back when, but i am not sure i’ve ever seen his name in a crossword before. i would say he’s the 4th most famous of those five emperors, ahead of only antoninus pius, but well behind trajan, hadrian, and marcus aurelius. (curiously, the dynasty that all five belonged to is called the nerva-antonine dynasty.) anyway, the fact that this is an unusual 5-letter answer fitting the pattern does suggest that we’re onto something.
- {Part of an ebike but not a bike} MOTOR.
- {Silas ___ Highway (Connecticut route named after an American revolutionary)} DEANE.
- {Suffix like -apalooza or -apuzzoola} ORAMA. this clue made me laugh. did i mention brooke is co-hosting lollapuzzoola in a month?
- {Nice morning we have here!} MATIN.
- {Triomphe-ent start?} ARC DE. a pair of clues for francophiles.
- {Vodka cocktail, for short} COSMO.
i suspect we need to do something with the middle letter in each of these. circling them in the grid and reading them off in order gives, uh, EATRTCSA, which is nothing. on the other hand, i can see that it anagrams to STATE CAR, which does seem like an extremely apt answer for this meta. let’s see if we can work out the correct ordering mechanism.
each of the state abbreviations used in the theme appears twice except for CO and VA. can we chain them together? yes we can: CO S MO T OR A MA T IN E AR C DE A NE R VA. so the road trip starts in colorado and ends in virginia, and does indeed make use of brooke’s STATE CAR. it’s, uh, not the most logical route geographically! colorado -> missouri -> oregon -> massachusetts -> indiana -> arkansas -> delaware -> nebraska -> virginia. but some road trips are all about the journey, right?
this is an unusual meta, i think. much (perhaps most) of the difficulty comes from just trying to figure out where the theme lives; once you find it, the mechanism is pretty straightforward for a week 4. i don’t know if there’s any hint anywhere in the puzzle to suggest looking at five-letter entries; if there is, i missed it. i did take note of the staircase formations of helper squares in the northeast and southwest corners of the grid, but my main takeaway from those was that those corners were probably very constrained by theme material, rather than the blocks being necessary to make certain entries exactly five letters long.
one thing i’m just now noticing is that literally no other entry in the grid (besides the eight themers) contains any two-letter state abbreviation as a substring. that’s … actually, that’s quite staggering, and supremely elegant. that elevates this meta to five stars for me—it means that any solver who goes looking for state abbreviations will of necessity find exactly the right subset of theme answers to look at. that was certainly my experience: i went looking for state abbreviations, stopped and stared at IN-EAR for a while because that was the first entry i found that contained any, and then i was on my way. that’s really quite a magnificent touch by the constructor.
recognizing that constraint preemptively answers what would have been my next question, which is why the fill is relatively less sparkly than one might expect from such a talented and meticulous constructor; if the only thematic constraint had been “put eight specific five-letter words into this grid in any order”, i’m sure we would have seen some better fill. but the inability to use any state abbreviations anywhere else constrains the fill mightily. if i had to guess, i’d wager that somewhere around a third of all the entries in my word list contain a two-letter state abbreviation, and maybe it’s higher than that!
i really enjoyed this meta, even before i noticed the extra layer of elegance. brooke told me it was her first meta, but i hope it will not be her last, because i’m really looking forward to her next one. how’d you all like it?
What’s a state car?
It’s a car that takes you from state to state. Also a play on Estate Car.
Was wondering the same thing!
There’s this thing called the ‘internet’ and ‘Google’ that might help you and C.Y.
Is the snideness really necessary? Do you honestly think I didn’t Google state car before asking about it here? I haven’t found a satisfactory explanation for it there or elsewhere. If you have one, I’d be glad to hear it.
OneLook lists a single dictionary with an entry for state car, and if you actually read it, it’s just a pointer to the entry for “49-state car”. To the best of my ability to tell, “state car” doesn’t seem to be a real phrase in the language. At a stretch it might apply to various government-owned vehicles (especially those used to transport heads of state), but those descriptions don’t fit the vehicle of the prompt.
+1 Amen
Somewhat flippant. No really flippant.
The main reason this played fairly easily for me is that I worked for the Massachusetts state planning office in my first job out of college. I didn’t own a car at the time, commuting to work by bicycle, and when I had to travel on official business, we called vehicles from the motor pool “state cars.” So I was thinking that’s what Brooke might use, and I looked right away for state abbreviations.
That was one of several strained interpretations I considered, grasping at straws, but it seemed highly implausible that Ms. Husic’s road trip around the country would in fact have been undertaken on official state business.
Ditto. Joon said the route was colorado -> missouri -> oregon -> massachusetts -> indiana -> arkansas -> delaware -> nebraska -> virginia.
The only kind of state car that would potentially be doing this would a national state car, like a Presidential State Car. Otherwise, a state car would be used in the state for which it is a state car, right?
198 right answers this week, right on target for a Week 4 of 5.
Nicely done, Brooke!
Another one, however I didn’t send it is if you take the first letters of the states and re-arrange them as follows:
Nebraska
Oregon
Massachussets
Arkansas
Deleware
Missouri
Indiana
Colorado
You get NOMADIC MIC which is an attachment for the Nomad travel program. It’s kind of far-fetched so I didn’t send it in but I think it’s interesting what you can find when you’re looking. By the way, not sure what a State Car is either, but it’s just as good as what I came up with, probably better.
I also noticed that other than the 3-letter entries, there are no other odd-letter entries other than the themers. That had to constrain the fill as well!
Enjoyable meta!
Great meta, I agree. I find it interesting that there seem to be so many thematic parallels among this month’s metas. It’s as if Week 2 (theme entries chained together by common letters and taking the one un-chained middle letter to get the solution) and Week 3 (5-letter entries and their middle letters) had a baby, it would be this Week 4. I’m sure this is coincidental, but I think the commonalities helped me see the right pathway this month quicker than I otherwise would have.
The first thing I noticed (besides the lack of themers) was the vagueness of the meta question:
“what I used for my road trip around the country”
It’s not what kind of vehicle, it’s “what I used.”
Having done a number of road trips myself, the obvious answer would be Interstates.
I stared at the grid for a while, and discovered there are only 8 letter Is in the grid. Using the DOWN number for the words in the grid that contain them, you get a very plausible list of Interstate highways that could be used for an all over the country road trip. I submitted INTERSTATES.
Okay, so now we’re going to snipe at each other because some people aren’t praising this as the most amazing meta ever? It wasn’t, and there’s fair game for criticism, so let’s not jump all over each other as a litmus test of fellowship.
It’s fair to judge this puzzle on a curve – Matt has been writing these for years now, and I assume he would be the first to say that wisdom comes with experience. Brooke Husic is a highly-acclaimed young constructor with major chops, but not on metas. I believe Matt said he specifically invited her to try her hand. It’s great to see all the different constructors developing their skills at the Muggles site, and Brooke’s next meta should be all the better from lessons taken from this one. Skills are supposed to improve with practice.
In my opinion, a great deal of the struggle with this one was born of the fact that state postal abbreviations are not normally the stuff of a Week four meta. It’s easy to overlook the obvious when you don’t expect it. There was nothing earth shattering or clever about a puzzle that relied on spotting NE and VA in ‘Nerva’, so it’s fair to say “Great first meta!”, but not “Great meta!”. We can talk all day about how the grid configuration was odd and how the grid entries were even odder and blame it all on “The constraints of the meta”, which is fine, but, again, for a first time effort, so let’s celebrate it for that.
Regardless of whether this was a first or thirty-first construction, there’s a poor match between the prompt and the answer. A turnpike, an RV, a pop up tent, and a road atlas are used for a cross country road trip; if Brooke took a ‘state car’, that’s fairly the farthest thing from the solvers’ minds. I looked at the string of letters generated from the mechanism and thought both “No way!”, and “It can’t be coincidence.” No one could possibly have felt a solid click when submitting this. Surely there was a prompt that would have better matched “state car”, without having to change a single thing about the grid or its fill.
Finally, there’s room to criticize cluing that seems a little too determined to needle the old fogies. I get that we trend old, but yet, we are. Extra hip puzzles can be a poke in the eye, even when they’re not meant to be.
This was a great first meta, and count me among the many who I am certain are hopeful that Brooke Husic will make many more – each one better than before. But let’s not snipe at solvers who dare suggest that this wasn’t a paragon of metas. It wasn’t.
Huh? Who’s sniping at people for saying “this isn’t the most amazing meta ever”? There’s literally one comment from a single commenter above saying “the internet is your friend” if you haven’t heard of a state car, which is a bit snide, but that has zero to do with criticizing others for not praising the meta enough.
Why does it matter if state abbreviations aren’t the first thing you think of on a Week 4 puzzle? It’s a Week 4. The correct path is almost never your first thought unless it’s Week 1.
And even if you didn’t care for the fact that NERVA starts and ends with state abbreviations … there was a lot more to the meta than just that. It had five-letter answers that have to proceed in a chain (and no other five-letter answers), with the middle letters spelling out something that’s relevant to the puzzle’s theme, all while avoiding two-letter state abbreviations everywhere else. If you’ve never made a crossword before, that last bit is a super-difficult constraint to work around and would be highly challenging for *any* constructor, not just one making their first meta.
Again, it’s a Week 4. The answer’s not going to be your first thought. And the fact that it’s a state car ties in nicely with the state abbreviations theme.
That’s false; I had a solid click on the answer STATE CAR, knowing the meta was about a road trip and looking for state abbreviations. That you didn’t have a solid click on it or didn’t like the wording of the prompt is a shame, but don’t project that onto everyone else by saying no one could have thought otherwise.
While I am sympathetic to feeling frustrated because the puzzle had information you didn’t know, I don’t think it’s helpful to blame Brooke for putting in “extra hip” clues. Besides the fact that “extra hip” is a vague term (does it mean pop culture? that’s what I take it you mean but maybe I’m wrong), I’d bet money she wrote the clues the way she did because she was including information and expressing values that were important to her. Every constructor does that. It’s okay if this one puzzle doesn’t mesh with all of your preferences; that shouldn’t be taken as a sign that she’s trying to exclude older solvers from enjoying it. There are plenty of older solvers out there who don’t mind encountering “extra hip” information in a crossword.
Evan: Something tells me that you have misread everything I said, but oh well. Have at it.
I’m sure Joon will provide you with my address. Why not write and tell me more?
No, I don’t think I misread what you said. It’s far from the first time I’ve read criticisms like yours. But you’re welcome to tell me why you disagree with me.
I’d rather continue the conversation here instead of by private email, but thanks for the offer.
I, too, had to look up Alice Sara Ott. However, she’s an award-winning musician NOW, and Mel Ott died 60 years ago.
Calling valid trivia you don’t know a “poke in the eye” is profoundly self-centered.
I did not read ”sniping”
I just see honest reactions
I enjoyed the meta but I thought State Car might be a clue, so I spent time looking for a car that followed the same pattern. I came up with the Chevy Capri (Tesla was close) but that was obscure and from 30 years ago, so in the end I went with Statecar.
I thought this was a great meta and I don’t agree with any of the criticisms expressed here, but I don’t care to fight about it. I gave it 5 stars, DMed Brooke to say how much I liked it, and am going to go have dinner now.
Speaking of which, I will be 69 y/o in January. This is not a “snipe” at the puzzle nor puzzler but rather my age. While I was doing the puzzle I thought “I should get some special Icon in the Hall of Fame for just finishing the puzzle. I lost about ten pounds running back and forth from the living room to the bedroom to google things. Alas, Mel Ott and I will be soon forgotten. Even my computer started cursing at me. Having constructed a few puzzles though, I’ve got to agree, using 5 letter words only as themes is pretty tough. On the other hand IIRC.
Good job
I’m just getting to this discussion now and I’m going to add my 2 cents even though no one may ever see this comment. As one of the old fogey solvers (exactly a year older than Dean S.), I loved the way David expressed his impatience with the “hip” type of clues. I get tired of all the pop culture references in the puzzles. I know all kinds of things, but I also have a sense of what information is known to other people. I think the “hip” cluers are missing this sense.
I didn’t know OLD could be clued as [Someone who has decided to stop learning], but now I do. Thanks!
I felt the clueing stood out as being more feminist and all around inclusive than the typical crossword. I think the fact that this stood out highlights the importance for including more clues like this. I was unfamiliar with Jenny Taft, Skai Jackson, and Alice Sara Ott. There are so many other names like Mel Ott, James Agee, Esai Morales, Lesley Stahl etc. who I knew nothing about before doing crosswords. The cluing for “LESS” was my favorite, and I enjoyed the reveal of DADSTOBE
Wow, that turned ugly fast! It is why I seldom post here (having seen this before) but rather on the muggle site. We have differences of opinion there as well but you would NEVER see this level of sniping and ad hominem attacks. It was a clever meta, it had a lot of constraints, but the question of whether STATE CAR was a weak ‘click’ is moot. Perhaps it would have been possible to add an E (? AREPA) to the mix and get ESTATE CAR – yes, again a specialized knowledge, but obviously this group does not disdain that. What is a shame is that a new constructor’s puzzle generated such negative comments from others. I’d bet Brooke was somewhat put off by that. She shouldn’t be, but I’d bet she was.