MGWCC crossword 1:09
meta DNF 3 days 
[3.70 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #906 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Whaddya Say?”. the instructions this week ask for a two-word phrase. what are the theme answers? i don’t know. there are two “long” answers, which is to say two 10s in this 10×10 grid:
- {Treasured Yankee} AARON JUDGE. a curious clue—yankees fans revere him, i suppose, but “treasured” still looks pretty sus.
- {Book report or personal essay, say} ASSIGNMENT. it did not escape my notice that this clue ends with “essay, say”—especially in light of the puzzle title.
i really haven’t got any idea what to do with these two. AARON JUDGE is associated with the phrase “all rise” at yankee stadium (a fairly obvious play on his surname). i don’t know that non-baseball fans would know that, but it is what sprang to mind when i thought about that answer and the puzzle title. there are, as usual, a smattering of answers in the grid clued as spoken expressions outright (PAY ME) or using spoken expressions (UMPS and ELWES).
the title could also cryptically suggest homophones. there are a few answers that have homophones: THOM/TOM, TEAS/TEASE, EERO/ARROW (?), LEAR/LEER, OLDE/OLD, MOORE/MORE, LEDE/LEAD. but i don’t know what we’d do with those. they aren’t clued elsewhere in the grid.
oh, i see it now—it’s the clues, and the AARON JUDGE clue is indeed sus. eight clues are two words with the initials TY:
- 1a {Tunesmith Yorke} THOM.
- 11d {That yacht} HER.
- 12a {Treasured Yankee} AARON JUDGE. in retrospect, this could have been {Towering Yankee}, as he’s 6’7″, 282 lbs., in addition to being towering in the more metaphorical sense of being one of the best players in baseball.
- 13d {Tennis’s Yannick} NOAH.
- 17d {Tragic yell} KEEN.
- 22d {Tirelessly yammer} YAP.
- 31a {Typifying yesteryear} OLDE. this clue also should have been sus to me the first time around—i don’t think it’s doing enough to indicate the quaint spelling OLDE as opposed to just OLD.
- 32a {“Time!” yellers} UMPS.
taken in order, the first letters of their answers spell out THANK YOU, which is often abbreviated to “TY” in text messages. (not by me, though—i prefer “thx” myself.)
whew. i came closer than i would have liked to whiffing on a week 2 meta with a 10×10 grid that only took me a minute to solve. but i got there, and i am appropriately grateful.
how’d you all find this one?
Is the only hint to the path to the solution the fact that you prompt a toddler to say thank you by saying “What do you say?” Yikes. And double yikes because I would never ever write that phrase as the informal version in the title. To my ear, that’s used when you propose an idea to someone and ask if they’re up for it. If the title had been the formal version, that would have been much better imo.
I’m calling another instance of the week 2 curse. I think this scaled above the week 2 target difficulty
+1
I went down a different path – I saw 6 words with “extra” letters.
In grid order of the “extra” letters:
– T(H)OM
– M(O)ORE
– A(A)RON JUDGE
– OR(R)IN
– A(S)SIGNMENT
– OLD(E)
Which got me to HO(A)RSE… but I couldn’t think of a two word phrase to work, so at the last minute went with HORSE COLLAR (to loosely pair with HOARSE CALLER). Hard to unsee the HO(A)RSE once I got there.
With the 2 d’s in “Whaddya”, I was sure that meant that the double letter answers were the path to solving this one… NNope!
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
I should think that “the only path” to this solution were the eight of thirty-six clues that took the form of “T___ Y___”, especially the three in a row at 11D,13,D and 17D.
It’s not as if several of them weren’t a bit curious – why would Aaron Judge be clued as a “Treasured” Yankee, and why would a puzzle writer voluntarily refer to a “keen” as a “Tragic Yell”?
Anyone who says “How was I supposed to get this from the title alone?” has answered their own question – you weren’t. The “in” came from noticing that more than ⅕ of the clues were TY, and that the first letters of their corresponding grid entries spelled out the solution “Thank You”, the correctness of which was confirmed by the title.
I thought for sure that a 10×10 puzzle released on 10/10 would have some sort of ten related theme!
It sort of did – the answer was 10 Q : )
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
BOOOOOOOO!
(I literally LOled at this.)
Too far out there for me.