meta DNF
Screenshot
i did get my spidey sense tickled by a few clues that seemed deliberately worded to invite more than one possible correct answer; finding such clues is often the second or third step in a late-month meta, but when you don’t see the first step, sometimes it’s all you can go on, so let’s have a look:
- {Part of a Santa costume} SUIT. right off the bat at 1-across, this is not how SUIT is normally clued. but this kind of clue is often seen for BEARD, or perhaps HAT or BOOTS.
- {Connecting (with)} IDENTIFYING. this is usually the way TYING IN gets clued.
- {Poetic contraction that drops a V} E’EN. could be O’ER.
- {You might block them online} ADS. i was thinking DMS.
- {Name on a newspaper comics page} DAVIS. this one was perhaps the most sus—there are a kajillion DAVISes, and even if you’ve decided to clue garfield cartoonist jim, this is not how you word the clue unless you’re trying to be deliberately ambiguous. that said, it doesn’t suggest a specific different answer very strongly, since there could still be so many alternate answers (any name in the title of any popular comic strip and/or the first or last name of any cartoonist).
- {Catches some rays, perhaps} FISHES. this could just be a tricky clue. (for the record, i enjoyed it as a tricky clue qua tricky clue.) but obviously it could also suggest something like BASKS or TANS or SUNS.
having noted these, i have to confess that no two of them taken together suggest any more specific mechanism, so i’m thinking this isn’t how we’re meant to break into this meta.
what about the title and instructions? the instructions aren’t much help—i tried looking at one-syllable answers in the grid, and although they do include some of the sus clues above (SUIT, E’EN, ADS), they also include some clues that very obviously cannot have any alternate answers, e.g. {Surname for all baptized male Sikhs} for SINGH. there are no monosyllabic clues; of course, many clues contain monosyllabic words, but there is no way to pick out signal from noise there.
how about the title? directions often refers to compass directions (NSEW) or arrow key directions (UDLR). there aren’t really any more of those in the grid than you would expect (N, S, and E are, of course, all quite common letters). there are more I’s and fewer R’s than you would expect, but i don’t know what to do with that.
casting about less systematically now in desperation, i note that {Unlike Grover Cleveland’s presidential terms} is a perfectly plausible clue for CONSECUTIVE, the other 11-letter in the grid (symmetric to IDENTIFYING)… but CONSECUTIVE is also a synonym of STRAIGHT, which is, in some sense, a direction. is there anything here? i’d feel better about it if i could think of a synonym for IDENTIFYING that was also a direction. obviously BIKE LANE and SCRANTON, the next two longest answers, do not have directional synonyms, so maybe this isn’t going anywhere. UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT do all have non-directional synonyms, but i don’t see any of those (e.g. ARISEN, SAD, DEPARTED, CORRECT) in the grid. i think i just wrote a meta that isn’t this meta, anyway.
well, i’m stumped. i feel like i never got anywhere close to finding the first step here. it’s frustrating—i have what my memory tells me is a very poor success rate on will nediger’s guest metas here, but every time i’ve missed one, it’s been staggeringly brilliant and made me feel even more sharply in retrospect the anguish of not seeing it. i’m sure that’ll be the case again here.
Why I Love Metas (Don’t Worry, It’s Long)
Part I
I remember Nediger’s epic “My Cup Runneth Over” well, so I was ready for an encore!
Oh, this shouldn’t be too bad. (He says that now.) IDENTIFYING CONSECUTIVE are the two theme entries, and a quick look at the clues show that we have five pairs of entries whose clue references two consecutive letters.
AYO (honorary Irishwoman = HI)
ENYA (County Donegal = CD)
IAM (Virginia Woolf = VW)
ODE (John Keats = JK)
URN (John Keats = JK)
Obviously, this is completely relevant, especially with each vowel represented, so we have to figure out what to do with this. I got this far in about 30 minutes, so I figured I could grok the whole meta in 60 – 90 minutes, right? Right???
(Narrator: That did not happen.)
Now, my immediate response would be to play alternates in a situation like this, especially with two-letter bigrams that all seem relevant: greeting, antiquated music storage system (my students will never know the joy of CDs), car model, playful retort. The constrained clue for DAVIS made me rethink how “Hi!” would be used, since “Hi and Lois” is a comic strip, and Hi is also a name in the comic sections (character vs. cartoonist but still).
But that’s all that dropped. No viable alternates for CD, JK, or VW were in sight, despite how much I tried to shoehorn them in. And even then, what was the significance of the vowels? Proper ordering of the alternates, perhaps? Do I connect them: AHI (ooh! a colorful swimmer!), ECD (ooh! that’s nothing!).
Another thing to consider was the title because, yes, I was following the directions of attempting to identify consecutive letters (and maybe there were others hidden in the grid and clues; I think there were also five other instances of consecutive letters in initial words in clues, albeit more hidden), but you’re always following directions in a meta, right? So that was a bit suspect, perhaps.
And, then, that SW corner seemed very constrained to me per its fill. I thought likely either FACADE or INKLING might be involved because they both have several consecutive letters of the alphabet (CDEF if you go out of order in FACADE), and couldn’t we get cleaner fill down there? Is something else going on?
Oooh! Check out the clues again!
AYO = Edebiri…
ENYA = Singer…
IAM = “Who’s…
ODE = First…
URN = Last…
Man alive, I thought a compass was involved. Look at those first three clues! And we did have words like UNWISE, which embed NW and SE so beautifully.
At this point, I had spent probably about 6 hours on Saturday and maybe even 3-4 on Sunday. What was going on? What was escaping me?
Part II
Obviously, if you’re reading this, you know the punchline, and you can retroactively tell me to see what’s relevant. But if it wouldn’t drop, it wouldn’t drop.
And then, also wondering if something was going on in the NW and SE corners, I saw something:
BIKE(L)ANE
SC(R)ANTON
I definitely know about bike lanes, but maybe I thought it seemed like an odd entry? And my brain had already seen Scranton, per the use of Pennsylvania in the clue, which does contain ENYA. Perhaps the use of “Dedicated” in the clue for BIKELANE made me think that would connect to John Keats, since odes are dedicated to people? Not sure. But “L” and “R” are certainly directions.
Okay, wait a minute, Mikey, hold on. Those are symmetric. But is that another coincidence? And how does that connect? Are there other Ls and Rs?
Bingo. There are five, they are all symmetric, and that would also explain the SW constraint (since we couldn’t add any other Ls and Rs, two common letters).
At this point, I absolutely still thought the entries from earlier mattered. Oooh, okay!
In top-bottom order: LRRLR
In AEIOU order:
(A)YO
ENY(A)
IA(M)
(O)DE
UR(N)
Is AAMON anyone well-known involving directions? I did just draft Amon-Ra St. Brown in fantasy football. Is Will telling me I’m going to win my league this year?
I tried finding letters to the left and right of the Ls and Rs as well, and that was nothing either. But there is no way we’d have these two coincidences, would we?
Ultimately, I give a shout-out to my teachers for this one. They instilled in me a love of learning throughout the years and encouraged me to foster a sense of muscular curiosity.
They also gave me a bunch of tests. Many, many bubbles were filled out. I made my marks heavy and dark.
And we used the ubiquitous SCANTRON.
SCRANTON/SCANTRON (with the “R” moving right, implying the “L”s would move left) and that’s the alternate for EXAM.
I LOVE METAS.
Well, I still needed to find all the alternates; ironically, the one for BIKELANE was the last to drop, even though I felt DAVIS would be relevant earlier.
Grid order gets us to SIDLE, a great, fun…two-syllable word. Ugh! But, I made sure not to submit that prematurely and looked at that beautiful “L” sitting there, waiting to be slid like all the others…and we get it to SLIDE, the answer to another incredible meta.
About two minutes later – and I didn’t submit right away since I needed to regroup – I started laughing.
“Oh. So those consecutive letters were just a giant rabbit hole after all.” And I was so confident for 36 hours too! Oh, well, I guess I’ll let that one SLIDE.
Thank you, Will, for another great conundrum. My cup runneth over with gratitude. (Oh, sorry, that was a previous guest meta; I’ll get better at following directions.)
Mikey G
Awesome comments!
Argh! I did notice SCRANTON was similar to SCANTRON but didn’t link it to EXAM.
Five weird clues each hint at another word or phrase that you can create by taking an entry with an L and shifting the L to the left, or an entry with an R and shifting the R to the right. There are only two L’s and three R’s in the puzzle.
BREAD –> shift R to the right to make BEARD –> SUIT
INKLING –> shift L to the left to make LINKING –> IDENTIFYING
BIKE LANE –> shift L to the left to make BIL KEANE –> DAVIS
WREATHE –> shift R to the right to make WEATHER –> LAST
SCRANTON –> shift R to the right to make SCANTRON –> EXAM
First letters of those five entries in grid order spell SIDLE. Do the same process one more time (shift L to the left) and get SLIDE.
(lol, I posted this shortly after Mikey posted an entire essay of his process.)
Great meta, Will!
BIKELANE / BILKEANE was worth the price of admission. I wonder if that was the ge(r)m.
Mechapuzzle (https://boisvert42.github.io/mechapuzzle/) was pretty helpful for this one, in order to see the low frequency of Ls and Rs in the grid.
Thanks, Will! Impressive as usual…
174 correct answers this week, 54 of which were solo solves. Right on target for a Week 5!
I stupidly sent in the incorrect answer SIDLE without re-reading the instructions. Curious, how many other SIDLE submissions did you get?
Brilliant meta.
Here is the only thing I found…
In one diagonal, beginning at the Enn in IDENTIFYING, the next diagonal square to the right is the letter E, and thus we have NE — a direction, pointing to the NORTHEAST.
So, I went to the opposite of that NE, and in the SW I found the word TAKE, with a black square on the diagonal rise.
Wonderfully clever, but viciously difficult! I guess if I had ever heard of Scantron or Bil Keane, I might have had a chance (they are not really known in the UK), but probably not to be honest …
i can agree with “viciously difficult”, as somebody who grew up in the US and is familiar with scantron and bil keane (the latter more from american crosswords than from reading comic strips, to be honest—he’s pretty much the only one-L BIL out there). in fact, after reading about the meta, i have a dim memory of having seen that BIKE LANE / BIL KEANE wordplay somewhere before.
viciously difficult, but it was gettable—i certainly thought about BEARD in relation to the santa costume and there was BREAD sitting there in the middle of the grid. and to alex’s point above, i had noticed the relative dearth of R’s (but not L’s). so the pieces were there for me to put together, and damn, i wish i’d gotten it. quite a brilliant puzzle.
I had the same dim memory. Google told me this was a NPR Puzzler question from Will Shortz. Bil Keane sent Will a personalized cartoon referring to Jim Davis. How meta is that?
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/12/17/crosswords/17wordplay-keane/17wordplay-keane-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=1200