MGWCC #899

MGWCC crossword 3:18 
meta DNF 3 days [4.10 avg; 5 ratings] rate it

hello, and welcome to episode #899 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Gone Fishin'”. the instructions this week tell us that we are looking for an adjective describing a late, great crossword writer who would’ve turned 70 in a few weeks. Invoke his name to solve the meta! okay. what are the theme answers? well, i don’t know, but the central across clue is {Hook who would’ve turned 70 in a few weeks; invoke his surname to solve the meta!} for HENRY. so we are supposed to “invoke” hook somehow. what could this mean?

my first thought was to look for hook-shaped sections in the grid, perhaps hooking off the end of the long across answers, that spell something out. but i don’t actually see anything there. for the record, those long across answers are:

• {Lord’s home} MANOR HOUSE.
• {Good times to take a shot} KODAK MOMENTS.
• {United Nations role} SPECIAL ENVOY.
• {She starred in “Doctor Detroit” with Dan Aykroyd, then married him} DONNA DIXON. not a familiar name to me.

i do rather suspect something related to the meta is constraining the fill in the lower right area, where we have random roman numeral MLXIV crossing alphabetic trigram MNO. but i can’t get make anything really work in terms of being able to read off actual words in hook shapes.

my second thought was that “hook” might just refer to the shape of the letter J, but that was the mechanism in the previous mgwcc henry hook tribute puzzle, of which there have been several (at least three). that was three years ago, though, so maybe it’s long enough to at least use the idea again of hook = J, if not repeat the exact mechanism of mgwcc #728.

actually, now that i look at it, the grid is a lipogram for J—all of the other 25 letters of the alphabet appear at least once. (for that matter, the same is true of the clues—no J anywhere, and all of the other letters, though this is less remarkable.) so, hmm, maybe J is the key. are there places where we can stick in a J to get valid fill in both directions? this certainly does not commonly happen by accident, which is why J is quite an infrequent visitor in crossword grids. and… indeed, i don’t see any squares in this grid where a J could come in and work in both directions.

that doesn’t mean the idea is totally bad, though. what about just one direction? LAY could become JAY, and the clue {Put (down)} for LAY is also intriguing, because it could also be a valid clue for JOT. and {Long, strange strip} is a more than slightly weird clue for VOYAGE. (i’m assuming it’s supposed to be “trip”—but still a little weird.) it could also suggest JOURNEY, which isn’t the same length but does start with J. is this what we’re supposed to be doing?

oh, i’ve just noticed something adjacent to this idea but not quite—i think this must be it. {Derive pleasure from} clues LIKE, but it perhaps more closely suggests the word ENJOY, which is ENVOY (a word from one of our long across answers) with a J replacing the V. are there other words we can make by subbing in a J? yes, MAJOR, KOJAK, and DIJON. all, curiously, with the J in the middle of a 5-letter word. this is definitely going to be something:

• {Great in importance} WHOPPING, or MAJOR (not MANOR).
• {Classic cop show} I SPY, or KOJAK (not KODAK).
• {Derive pleasure from} LIKE, or ENJOY (not ENVOY).
• {Mustard type} YELLOW, or DIJON (not DIXON).

i don’t think there’s any point in extracting the letters that get replaced by J in the themers—there is very little wiggle room from a constructor’s perspective to select those letters, especially if you try to stick to the constraint of taking the middle letter of a 5-letter word. but the four other answers in the grid, which offer quite a bit more freedom for matt to select, are what we should be looking at, because their first letters spell out WILY, which must be the meta answer.

this is definitely a subtle meta. the hook/J equivalence is not the hardest first step, but it’s suggested more by the absence of J’s than by anything else, and it’s harder to notice the negative space, especially since J is an uncommon enough letter in general that it’s hardly conspicuous by its absence. even once i homed in on the idea of trying to use J’s, the actual mechanism was the third one i tried, and i maybe stumbled on it by accident, noticing the clue for LIKE at 40-across while i was trying to do something with LAY at 40-down. so there was an element of serendipity in my solve, but i am grateful for it, because it was quite an enjoyable experience.

there was probably an easier in—i bet some people after thinking about J noticed the MAJOR/KOJAK/ENJOY/DIJON substitutions in the long themers rather than combing through the clues in the rest of the puzzle. that’s probably the intended solving path, but i missed it.

anyway, i liked this puzzle. what’d you all think?