MGWCC #831

 

hello, and welcome to episode #831 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, “You Can Say That Again”. for this week 1 puzzle, the instructions were quite unnecessary. what were the theme answers? some, but not all, of the longest answers in the grid were thematic. with a hint from the title, it was not hard to spot four pairs of intersecting answers with identical clues that were all equivalent spoken expressions:

• {“I’m soooo glad to hear this…” [eyeroll]} clues THAT’S JUST GREAT and OH JOY. this was the first and easiest theme pair to find, for several reasons: it used the longest answer in the grid, it was near the top of the grid, and the [eyeroll] in both clues made it quite clear that the clue similarity was not an accident.
• {“Time for me to throw in the towel”} YOU WIN / I GIVE.
• {“Enjoy the meal!”} DIG IN / BON APPETIT.
• {“Send that info my way when you can”} FAX IT OVER / TEXT ME. this one’s a bit forced, as the two answers are from two very different eras, and FAX IT OVER is a bit stretched as an in-the-language spoken phrase.

anyway, what’s the meta answer? i mentioned before that both answers in each case intersect. circling the letters at the intersection and reading down the grid spells out JINX, a beautifully apt punch line to this little joke—although it does recast the premise of the meta mechanism from one person saying the same thing twice (as suggested by the title) into two people saying something at the same time.

matt has done very well to get the thematic J in very natural language, and if the X is a bit forced, well, that’s perhaps more to be expected. off the top of my head, i can’t think of a pair of equivalent spoken expressions that both use X without significant semantic overlap (e.g. EXACTLY and EXACTAMUNDO).

this is a great week 1 puzzle. easy enough to be accessible to just about everyone, but with a fresh feel and an enjoyable payoff. the grid is a bit unwieldy—not anything like symmetric, but that was necessary to accommodate four pairs of intersecting themers of a bunch of different lengths. in such circumstances, abandoning symmetry was the only reasonable choice.

bits & pieces:

• {The ___ (big search engine, casually)} GOOG. thumbs down on this one from me.
• {___ Swiatek (current #1 women’s tennis player)} IGA. the clue kind of understates it—she’s been #1 for 100+ weeks now (though not all contiguously), and over the weekend she defeated #2 aryna sabalenka in the finals of madrid in the best tennis match of the year so far. just an incredible player, especially on clay.
• {Top card in a royal flush, in Italian} ASSO. this is a new foreign word for me. i’ve seen it clued as a partial, like {“___ often is the case”}.

that’s all i’ve got this week. how’d you like this one?