MGWCC #891

MGWCC crossword untimed; meta ~2 days off and on [4.57 avg; 7 ratings] rate it

Welcome to a week 4 of 4 meta from the incomparable master of metas, Matt Gaffney. This week the title of the meta is “Edge of Seventeen” and we are asked to find a fitting five-letter term.

MGWCC #891

I always like to make a few high-level assumptions about the meta answer (which may or may not turn out to be true!) before solving the grid. One is after seeing that there are five long acrosses, we can assume for now these are meta-related, reinforced by the instruction to look for a five-letter term. So a strong possibility is that each theme answer contributes one letter to the final answer. Another thing to notice is that we’re looking for a “term,” not a name, for instance, since my mind immediately went to NICKS based on the title.

Finally, although the title is also the title of a very famous song, I doubt that the lyrics of the song, its singer or its origin have any meta import. I’m thinking instead that “edge” has to do with the physical edge of something, perhaps the edge of the grid, harkening back to grids which “think outside the box” where letters extend past the edge of the grid. Here, maybe no extending is going on, but letters around the perimeter of the grid may be important. And the number 17 must be important as well–perhaps there are 17 letters around the edge of the grid which spell out an instruction? None of the long entries are 17 letters long so the 17 must mean something else, perhaps clues that are numbered in multiples of 17 or 17-letter clues?

So now let’s look at those five long across answers:

• 16a: [Chicagoan who loved “Chicago”]: ROGER EBERT – indeed he did, giving it an enthusiastic thumbs up
• 22a: [“My Cousin Vinny” car]: BUICK SKYLARK – the ’64 model famously “lacks positraction“
• 34a: [Party like a rockstar]: PAINT THE TOWN RED – not said much these days I think, but I’m familiar with the phrase
• 48a: [People get presents in their absence] – SECRET SANTAS – pun on the homophone “presence”; actually any Secret Santa game I’ve played the “santas” are all present, it’s just the receiver doesn’t know which one brought the present they are opening
• 58a: [Phillies catcher from 2006 to 2016] – CARLOS RUIZ

I first noticed the theme entries have a lot of repeated letters, all but the fifth one have at least one letter repeated 3 times (R, E, K, T and S), but alas, Carlos does not and that doesn’t seem to tie into the meta title anyway. Let’s see if any of the clues or the shorter entries stand out at all:

• 1d: [Plot measurement] for ACRE could also be 53a: [Sandal filler] for FOOT
• The crossing of IDOL and ICON at the I seems suspicious as they’re rather synonymous
• Odd to see the repetition of 49d: [Marsh growth] for REED in the clue of 52a: [They need a reed] for OBOES
• Lots of overlap too between 44d: [Got home safely] for SCORED and 47d: [Gets home] for BATS IN
• 46a: [Airline since the 1920s] for IBERIA seems unusual to clue an airline by its year of founding but also the entry has many more interesting geographic connotations
• I’ve never heard of the 11d: [Classic arcade game] of CONTRA
• 46d: [“Was ___ harsh?”] for I TOO works but the entry is generally clued to the Langston Hughes poem as opposed to a partial
• I’m not a fan of the clue for 23d: [Keep an eye on] for SEE TO as the phrase means “address” or “take care of” in my mind
• 63a: [Rastafarian’s pronoun] for I AND I is new to me and me
• Haven’t seen the hoary 41a: [First name in detective fiction] for ERLE (of Erle Stanley Gardner of “Perry Mason” fame) in quite a spell

Let’s go back to the grid and look at the letters around the perimeter (or edge)–there are 12 along the top and bottom and 13 along the sides for a total of 48 in total, consisting of 9 words. I’m reticent to look at too much of the grid other than the 5 theme entries as it’s hard enough just to get those in, even with a few unusual entries like KINO, I AND I, THEN OK and FOR FUN to tie them together. I am noticing one thing now though it’s the entry TOMES which is one letter away from TOMEI who spoke the famous quote about the Buick in “My Cousin Vinny.” Could that S becoming an I be referring to the “edge” of that word? Hard to believe there are 17 of these, but I’ll start digging.

I’m the 17th letter of the alphabet!

OK, another Sunday morning breakthrough! I noticed that the last name of RUIZ could become QUIZ replacing that R with a Q. I did early on consider that the 17 in the title might refer to the 17th letter of the alphabet, but after a quick (!) scan of the grid, I didn’t see any Q’s and didn’t consider replacing the starting letters (edge?) of words with a Q. So is it possible that the other 4 theme entries might allow for the same treatment? Read on, gentle readers:

• EBERT becomes Q*BERT (difficult to see since this is one of 3 entries that don’t follow the QU* pattern)
• BUICK becomes QUICK
• RED becomes Q.E.D. (another difficult one to see)
• SANTAS becomes QANTAS (ditto)
• And the one that put me on the rabbit’s trail: RUIZ becomes QUIZ

So I was feeling good about these, but didn’t know what to do with them, thinking maybe the replaced edge letters would spell something–but that just led me to the gobbledygooky EBRSR. Insight #2 was the recollection of the unusual classic video game entry as well as the strangely vague clue for IBERIA. Could it be that each of these new Q- words could relate to other clues in the grid? Hmmmm…..

• Q*BERT is a 11d: [Classic arcade game] or CONTRA
• QUICK is a possible answer to 25a: [“Take care of this ASAP”] or URGENT
• Q.E.D. could answer 64a: [“Finis!”] or END
• QANTAS could answer 46a: [Airline since the 1920s] or IBERIA – Matt must’ve worked hard to find a clue that would work for both airlines
• QUIZ relates to 66a: [What a student may take in class] or NOTES

Put these 5 letters together to spell our our meta answer: CUE IN, with the final AHA being that cue is a homophone of the letter Q and indeed, we are putting a Q in these words!

Man, what a fabulous meta and very appropriate for one at the edge of the month. Kudos to Matt for finding 3 unusual Q- words that don’t jump out from the theme entries (without the second letter U) and also finding room to add 5 other entries in the grid that could share a clue with them. And the coup de grâce being the meta answer cleverly describing the meta mechanism itself.

Thanks to joon for letting me sit in the MGWCC reviewer’s seat for the last two weeks; I had fallen away from solving these weekly challenges lately and now I’m reinspired to get hooked again for the remaining 109!