MGWCC #889

MGWCC crossword 3:02 
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hello, and welcome to episode #889 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Missing Links”. the instructions this week tell us that This puzzle’s contest answer, which is 10 letters long, is something I hope you won’t have with this puzzle. interesting. what are the theme answers? the four longest acrosses are all of the form XXXX TO YYYY:

• {Reprimand} TAKE TO TASK.
• {“Don’t touch that dial!”} MORE TO COME.
• {Standard workday hours} NINE TO FIVE.
• {As directly atop your restaurant table as possible} FARM TO FORK. this was new to me—i’ve heard it as FARM TO TABLE, but not FORK.

so what’s going on? these aren’t arbitrary four-letter words in the ___ TO ___ answers; each pair shares two letters in common in the same location. that means you can connect them to each other using a single missing word (a missing link, if you will) in a word ladder:

• TAKE TO TASK can go through TASE (or TAKK, but that’s not a word).
• MORE TO COME via CORE.
• NINE TO FIVE via FINE.
• FARM TO FORK via FORM.

okay, this is promising. the next step is to notice that each of those missing links occurs once in the clues:

• {Decide not to tase, maybe} BONK. “tase” really doesn’t need to be in this clue—in fact, it’s unnecessarily violent—but it must be doing something in service of the meta.
• {It has a creme core} OREO.
• {Director of the fine films “Dunkirk” and “Tenet”} NOLAN. again, no reason “fine” needs to be here.
• {Weakens the form of, as a coastline} ERODES.

so far, so good. what’s next? well, there are two separate things going on here, and i think i noticed them in the opposite order that matt intended. the first thing i noticed was that the entry BONK is itself the start of a ladder of four-letter words hidden in four symmetric places in the grid:

• {Decide not to tase, maybe} BONK.
• {Win a huge amount in a tournament, in poker slang} BINK. never heard of this word.
• {Like Peppa Pig} PINK.
• {Select} PICK.

that’s when i realized that the meta answer had to be BONE TO PICK, as it fit the prompt perfectly, and you can indeed go from BONE to PICK using this word ladder. the second thing is that the first letters of the four answers to the clues above themselves spell out BONE, and if i’d noticed it first, it, rather than BONK, would have been a logical starting point for the word ladder.

so this was a very intricate meta with at least three and arguably four clearly defined steps. that’s normally not a recipe for a week 2 difficulty, but each step except, perhaps, for the extra hidden word ladder, was signposted fairly clearly, so i suspect it will end up being fairly appropriate in difficulty for a week 2. the hardest step to see also involved the weirdest entry in the grid (BINK), which did call attention to itself.

overall, though, this was a super clean and elegant meta. i’m very happy to see matt knock this one out of the park after a few shaky weeks (by his very high standards).

what’d you all think?