meta 1 day
Screenshot
- {Spare bed for a guest} AIR MATTRESS.
- {Admonishment to a slacker} YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY.
- {“Never can forget that one…”} I REMEMBER IT WELL.
- {Marilyn Monroe’s co-star in 1960’s “Let’s Make Love”} YVES MONTAND. i don’t know this film, and in fact i only know of this actor from crossword clues such as {French actor Montand} for YVES.
however, the first thing i noticed while solving that i was quite sure was thematic was none of these clues or answers—it was in fact the clue for 1-across, {What a moneyed person may do at dinner} TREAT. there has to be a reason for the unusual wording of this clue (in particular, the rare word “moneyed”). looking through some of the other clues, i noticed some other odd word choices—”skewering” and “breweries” in particular. these all contained E_E trigrams, which clicked with the title, and made me realize we were looking for E_E homophones of the first words of the long theme answers: AIR/ERE, YOU/EWE, I/EYE, and YVES/EVE. each of those trigrams appears exactly three times in the clues:
- {Sphere you live on} EARTH.
- {Inherently important} KEY.
- {Different} ELSE. none of the three ERE clues jumped out at me before i knew what was going on overall. these were all quite well concealed.
- {Nash known for skewering with words} OGDEN. he wrote humorous verse, to be sure, but i would not describe it as especially skewering, so this one was definitely striking.
- {Nat. with about 10,000 breweries} USA. this, too. of the infinite possible ways to clue USA, counting the number of breweries would not have been in my top 10,000 cluing angles.
- {Like a snippy reviewer’s comments} TRITE. this clue didn’t really even land with me while i was solving it. i’m not sure of the connection between snippy reviews and TRITEness.
- {What a moneyed person may do at dinner} TREAT. as i mentioned, this was the first thing i saw in the puzzle and also the first thing to set off my meta alert sensors.
- {Hackneyed ending to a movie} HUG. hackneyed goes much more closely with TRITE than it does with HUG, to be honest, but the meta demands an H here rather than a T.
- {From Cheyenne to Omaha, say} EAST.
- {Conflict-filled events} WARS.
- {“Never can forget that one…”} I REMEMBER IT WELL. very clever of matt to reuse this theme answer as a theme clue as well.
- {Leverkusen rejection} NEIN.
taking the first letters in order spells out EKE OUT THE WIN, which is a fun final answer, making use as it does of the only other common E_E word in english. (yes, scrabble enthusiasts, i know, EME is a scottish word for uncle. i haven’t got a scottish uncle.)
i think perhaps last week’s ch-ch-ch-ch- meta made me a little more attuned to the possibility that the meta might be hiding in the clues. it’s definitely more subtle to hide the E_E trigrams inside the clues than having ch- up front in 15 of them, but i do think the temporal proximity of these two metas made this week’s easier for me. and the title was more helpful this week than last week—even before starting, i was thinking about what “E’s into it” might connote in a meta mechanism. i was definitely thinking about inserting E’s rather than the actual mechanism, but it was still helpful to be thinking about E words.
so, overall, i think this was not as challenging as i was expecting from a week 4, after what i thought was a more-challenging-than-usual week 3. what’d you all think?
I saw the trigrams, but it took me a while to figure out what to do with them. I was also distracted by ‘precedent’ in 67A and ‘rejection’ in 52D.
And how are all 4 long answers involved?
Joon said it already but the first word of each long answer is a homophone of the key E?E word:
AIR –> ERE
YOU –> EWE
I –> EYE
YVES –> EVE
Totally missed that. I just jumped to the clues, like I usually do when I don’t see anything telling in the grid.
Thanks, joon — 222 right answers this week, of which 111 where solo solves (nice numerical symmetry there).
I have to admit that I didn’t even consider that solvers would look for the e?e strings in the clues without first noticing the ERE/EWE/EYE/EVE homophones. I guess the title should’ve given a little less away, or I shouldn’t scattered some more random e?e strings in the clues as noise.
Nope, nEVEr got close, EVEn knowing that the “ease” homophone had to have something to do with it.
The only thing I noticed was that changing one letter in YVESMONTAND yields either VERMONT or MONTANA. Take note, Matt! 😊
I didn’t notice the first words of the long answer clues. First thing I noticed was the e*e clues. I found the four words, WIN THE OUT EKE, and knew what the answer must be. I never figured out why the ordering was elegant. But it certainly is!
More obvious to me than e_e were the three diagonal chains of Ees:
• from the E in ENSURES SW to the E in ISLE
• from the E in KEY SW to the second E in EVEN
• from the first E in HENCE SE to the first E in EAGLE.
The first chain lands on a D
The second chain lands on the R in WARS. coupling that word from R, backward to D gets DRAW.
The third chain lands on the T in STOOD, which could yield TO
THE second chain has on its other end A
I noticed the connection to the starts of the themers while finding the examples in the clues thanks to David Letterman. All I know of Yves Montand is that he was a guest on Late Night once in the mid 80s and the exaggerated way that Dave repeatedly said “Eeeeeeeeeve” over the first 15 minutes of the shows stuck with me through the decades, buried in synapses waiting to be triggered by a meta crossword 38ish years later. Seeing the “eve” clues allowed me to put it together quickly…
I was eventually successful, but I did spend some time pursuing the observation that replacing EYE with TAN in MONEYED gives MONTAND.
My first two ideas for what to do with the homophones were to find them in the grid, and then look for clues that those homophones could satisfy. I got a tiny nudge and got it. I like that the real mechanism is a combo of my two ideas!
I knew E’s were going to be involved, just couldn’t figure out how. The pronunciation metas almost always trip me up, so nothing surprising here.
Wish I had known how to pronounce Yves.