MGWCC crossword 2:39
meta 1ish 
[4.30 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #915 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle guest puzzle from Paul Coulter called “Triple Entente”. this week’s instructions tell us that this puzzle’s contest answer is a quality you’ll need to solve it. okay, then. what are the theme answers? there are five long acrosses:
- {Yellow-skinned apple} GOLDEN DELICIOUS.
- {Cruises close to a coast} HUGS THE SHORE.
- {Parts of parents’ bedtime routine} GOODNIGHT KISSES. slightly awkward answer in the plural, necessitating a slightly clunky clue. i wonder if paul tried CHOCOLATE KISSES here first.
- {Tyke’s transport} THREE-WHEELER. more commonly called a tricycle.
- {Feminist prequel to “Jane Eyre”} WIDE SARGASSO SEA, by jean rhys.
with “triple” in the title and both HUGS and KISSES in the themers, it did not take me long to land on the trigrams OOO and XXX, respectively synonymous with those two words. indeed, all five themers contain a word that is synonymous with a triple-letter:
- DELICIOUS = “MMM!”
- HUGS = OOO
- KISSES = XXX
- THREE = III
- WIDE = EEE, if we’re talking shoes. i always enjoy a little repurposing of crosswordese in service of a meta.
the tripled letters spell out MOXIE, which is the contest answer. i don’t actually think it fits the prompt in any literal sense—it’s hard to make a credible case that any kind of determination/grit/nerve are especially necessary to solve this meta. but i’ll let it slide on poetic license.
i thought this was a pretty great early-month meta. the idea feels fresh to me—having done literally thousands of meta crosswords, i don’t remember seeing this idea before, and yet it’s a very simple and elegant mechanism. none of the triple-letter synonyms are in any way stretchy; it’s really about as clean a meta as you can expect to find. so that was great.
i was less enamored of some of the fill in the puzzle—right off the bat, the northwest corner contains A DAB, ALGA, ALLA, and ASADA, all of which are words that are to varying degrees unable to stand alone. ALGA is a rarely seen (outside of crosswords) singular, and the others are all best clued via fill-in-the-blank, which is fine if there’s one or two of them in a grid but noticeable when there’s quite a pileup. many other entries elsewhere struck me as awkward, too: ICE IT, EN LAI, EAUX, AHL, HAHS, TECS, OSSA, LETTER A, and the totally unknown-to-me {1959-74 Ford model pronounced like a star system} GALAXIE. i also found the presence of AAA in the grid to be inelegant/distracting given its nonparticipation in the meta.
clue i don’t really understand: {Member of Nirvana?} for BUDDHA. on the one hand, yes, nirvana is a buddhist concept. on the other, it definitely shouldn’t be capitalized if we’re not talking about the band name. on a third hand, i still don’t know if the clue works with a lowercase n. we’re saying that since the buddha has attained nirvana, he’s … a member? not sure i’m buying it.
anyway, that’s all i’ve got for this week. how’d you like this one?
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
Fantastic meta! I have a feeling the HUGS/KISSES will be a land-in for most people. I think DELICIOUS = MMM was mine, after musing on the fact that the words seemed simple enough in the themers that I had a feeling they might be pointing to something as opposed to, say, hiding a triplet of letters in the actual entry.
Three cheers for this meta!
Joon, you’re right, I shouldn’t have left AAA in the fill. I’d included it originally, so the clue could be a hint like, “Top-rated, as we hope you think this meta should be.” But Matt thought this would give too much away. Same for my idea to make the prompt something like “…5-letter quality that rarely draws a ZZZ.” I should have changed the area’s fill at this point, but the whole thing came together in two days, and I forgot.
I never got past the fact that 33A and 39D spell SARGASSO backwards (with ALGA at 1D). A watery rabbit-hole indeed . . .
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 3.5 stars
Gotta say, picking-out “wide” as the operative part of Wide Sargasso Sea is not a good place to start groking this meta.
I got hung up on LETTERA and AAA, and on SEC (triple sec), but the thing that really threw me off was the title. Triple Entente was an agreement between Russia, France, and Great Britain, and there are a lot of French words in the grid, plus a Russian-born conductor. I wish the title had been Triple Threat or something.
That said, it was a completely fair meta and I just missed it. The week 2 curse is real.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
Week two curse for me too. I kept trying to do something with entente rather than triple. I never even got close though it’s a good meta and it seems so easy now that it’s been pointed out to me!
Can’t believe AISLE and ISLE weren’t part of the solution, especially considering there is a third homonym, I’ll, that looks like Ill (roman three?) and the oddness of their clues. Oh well, I’ll be kicking myself for the rest of the week.