meta
Screenshot
- {*In and of itself} ESSENTIALLY.
- {*Set free} RELEASE.
- {*Unable to back out} COMMITTED.
- {*Suddenly appear} MATERIALIZE.
- {*Encourage to behave badly} INSTIGATE.
- {*Just barely manage to make ends meet} SUBSIST.
what to make of this? the title suggests something about states, which to me always brings state abbreviations to mind, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on with these—sure, COMMITTED, MATERIALIZE, and INSTIGATE begin with state abbreviations, but the others don’t. and certainly there isn’t anything obviously to do with crossing state lines suggesting itself.
the theme answers themselves are pretty dull—all single words, offering minimal opportunity for wordplay. what about alternate answers to these clues? hmm, we might be onto something here—several of them suggest two-word phrases where one of the words is two letters:
- {*In and of itself} ESSENTIALLY. but PER SE is a perfect alternate answer.
- {*Set free} RELEASE, or LET GO.
- {*Unable to back out} COMMITTED, or IN DEEP.
- {*Suddenly appear} MATERIALIZE, or maybe POP UP.
- {*Encourage to behave badly} INSTIGATE, or EGG ON? URGE ON? SPUR ON? probably EGG ON. any of these is a better fit to the clue than the actual answer in the grid, since to me, you INSTIGATE an action but you EGG ON a person or people to do that action.
- {*Just barely manage to make ends meet} SUBSIST, or maybe MAKE DO or EKE BY or GET BY or SCRAPE BY.
okay. if this is indeed the correct first step, what is the next step? it probably involves looking for other entries or clues in the puzzle that are connected to these alternate answers. if POP UP is right, it’s interesting that POP itself is in the grid at 28-down, clued as {Weasel’s sound}. similarly, PER SE might be related to {For a single item} PER at 11d. okay, and LET of LET GO is 85d {Tennis do-over}. this suggests that perhaps IN DEEP is wrong—maybe ALL IN? yes, ALL is in the grid—{Word in tennis scores} at 2d.
if EGG ON is right, there’s {___ Mason (former investment firm)} LEGG, suspiciously crossing never-heard-of-this {All-consonant sports cable channel} DGN at the second G instead of then much more natural LEGO/DON. okay, i think i’m convincing myself that LEGG is relevant to the meta.
it’s also downright bizarre that EGO is in the grid twice, once crossing the first G of LEGG and once again in the lower left corner, with the semi-apologetic clue {Word accidentally used twice in a crossword grid, like 50-Across and 86-Down herein (not meta-related, I just couldn’t get rid of them)} for REP. i have not been constructing crosswords for quite as long as matt, but i’ve been in the business for 15+ years and i’ve never heard this called a REP; i call it a DUPE and so does everybody else. but i’m prepared to accept matt’s disclaimer at face value—i don’t think it’s meta-related that EGO is in the grid twice, but i damn well think it matters that the EGO crossing LEGG couldn’t be changed to eliminate that dupe, since that is a tiny corner that could easily have been cleaned up.
so… EGG and EKE/GET are not in the grid on their own, but maybe as part of LEGG and 83d {“Can ___ your number?”} I GET. that’s less satisfying, but i don’t think it can be a coincidence that the other four are in the grid. that said, i still don’t know how to extract an answer, nor can i connect any of this to the puzzle title.
oh wait, now i see it—we do indeed need LEGG and I GET. if you look at the three letters just to the right of the relevant trigram in each case, the lower two letters are the two letter word. so ALL is next to (G)IN for ALL IN, PER next to (E)SE for PER SE, etc. extracting that upper-right letter in the six 3×2 formations spells out GEYSER, which is associated with wyoming because old faithful is there.
i don’t really understand what state line we are crossing with respect to the title, unless these formations are just meant to remind us of utah? i guess that must be it—the missing northeast corner of utah is, indeed, wyoming. so nothing to do with state names or abbreviations at all, just utah-shaped formations. wow.
okay, i’m out of time but i did just barely figure it out under the wire. whew.
I managed to solve this by staring at LEGG/DGN long enough — besides LEGO/DON, LENO/DON would be an easy enough switch to remove one of the two EGOs, so I focused on that until I saw EGG ON and then found the other (3,2) phrases shortly after. I imagine several others solved this the other way like Joon did, by thinking of the (3,2) phrases first and then looking for them in the grid.
I sent the e-mail previously to Matt, so he can confirm this but this road (opposed to the 3-2 road) was *exactly* my in.
I’m going to watch some Disc Golf Network to celebrate.
I’ve been doing crossword puzzles a loooooonnnngg time but seeing that a certain part of the grid is clunky and could have been better is never visible to me. I took Matt’s 90D disclaimer at face value, looking for ways he could have avoided that never entered my mind.
My co-solver noticed that if you assume Wyoming is the middle of the grid, the six theme answers roughly correspond to the location of the six states that surround WY, and RELEASE (MT) and SUBSIST (CO) divide the grid in half, just like the Continental Divide does, so we were sure the six-letter word was DIVIDE. The title really threw us off, we were focused on states and locations. Never got to alternate answers or looking for answers with two letters as part of it.
I think constructors have a little edge here. They notice oddities in puzzles that the rest of us don’t pick up on.
Nice save, joon! 207 correct answers this week, 100 of which were solo solves.
What I was going for was the “Utah” term sometimes used for a pattern of 5 black squares like this:
*
**
**
So the Wyoming connection is that that’s the state that occupies the missing 1/6 of the Utah structure. See this excellent meta:
https://crosswordfiend.com/2024/04/28/fireball-contest-april-24-2024/
Yeah, I too was fixated (and “…was too fixated…”) on crossing two-letter state abbreviations with the *’d entries; taking the title a little too literally. Would having the title something like “State and Restate” (the first part alluding to both the prompt and the Utah-shaped metanism, and the latter referencing alternative answers to the *’d clues) have made it too obvious?
I spent a lot of time exploring the assumption that the vertical starred entries were the state lines to be crossed. They divided the grid neatly into six regions of two columns with lots of state abbreviations. When I finally gave up that fruitless idea, PER SE was my opening into the correct reasoning. I remember thinking that ESSENTIALLY was not that great an answer to the clue, and finding PER was the nudge I needed.
wish there had been a way to clue the utah formation with something other than the pretty weak crossing-state-lines title. i couldn’t believe the terrible DGN fill but assumed, like double-EGO, there were constraints on the meta. that was surely the case, but it couldn’t get me there. just an amazing idea though and bravura construction. 4+
When the second version of the meta came out I stared long and hard at the two to see what the differences were that warranted such an action from Matt. All I could find was that the original clue for 8D was “*Let go” (RELEASE). That was it? Really? Had I been more savvy I would have known to use that in my efforts to crack the meta. Now it appears to have been a rare slip up.