Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Chump Change” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for a five-letter word. I couldn’t find any obvious theme entries at first, so I focused on the title”Chump Change.” Mike tends to be quite literal with titles like that. I tried to find CHUMP in the grid and see if I could change it. I rescanned the grid, and realized it contained C, H, U, M, and P exactly once. That could not be a coincidence.
WSJ Contest Solution – 09.01.24
I tried to change the CHUMP letters and the meta fell into place quickly:
- S(H)OWDOWNS -> S(L)OWDOWNS
- B(U)RROWED -> B(O)RROWED
- AS(C)ENTS -> AS(S)ENTS
- (M)ASTERLY -> (E)ASTERLY
- INE(P)TNESS INE(R)TNESS
The new letters spell our contest solution LOSER. The crossing down entries also work: SO(L)O, T(O)RN, (S)ALE, FILE(E), and SOA(R)ED. I backsolved INERTNESS/SOARED after realizing what the answer had to be, given “CHUMP.”
I was expecting a confirming step once I swapped the letters, and went back to the grid to see if could find it. I matched BORROWED to OWED… and fizzled out after that. I certainly could be missing something, but if I’m not, this felt a bit inelegant (I’m grading on a tough scale given how surgical Mike’s construction normally is). But the answer was a lock, so it was a fair meta. On a different note: some solvers seem to dislike metas that require character frequency analysis, but I’m not one of them. That is a tried and true meta mechanism, and this one was (relatively) easy to spot. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
I was looking for some additional confirmation, too, with respect to the newly-formed down entries and also found SOLO to ARIA along with your BORROWED to OWED.
Also, don’t you mean INEPTNESS /INERTNESS?
Also was distracted early on by asCENTS and that PENNIES (+ ST) could be anagrammed from INEPTNESS
Fixed, thanks!
Call me a chump. Call me a loser. I got nowhere with this.
The title’s “change” could have been nickels and dimes, etc., especially given the CENTS in the middle with ASCENTS (for which I originally had ASCENds until BORAT came along. But there’s no other money in the grid.
There’s at least three movie references: Was BORAT a chump? DAVE? Rocky Balboa? That didn’t go anywhere, either.
I guess the lesson here for me is to pay more attention to character frequency, which I never do.
Count me among those who strongly dislike character frequency as a significant meta element. If you solve on paper it’s a tedious, annoying, pain in the posterior, that most of the time leads nowhere.
It’s brilliant and well beyond my pay-grade. I was wise to spend only minutes on this one, then send in a wild guess (penny, based on the title and the center entry that contained the word cent. Congratulations to the constructor, and to those who found the solution.
The confirming step is that CHUMP and LOSER have similar meanings, so a chump is changed into a loser.
Simple in retrospect.
I was busy all weekend and didn’t have much time to look at it, but I did notice that MASTERLY could be EASTERLY, and maybe SHOWDOWNS could be SLOWDOWNS and INEPTNESS INERTNESS (but also INapTNESS). It didn’t click why I should be looking at those or that the crossings worked too. So close!
I tried INNS -> I(O)NS (ANODE), BURROWED -> B(O)RROWED (OWED), VANES -> V(I)NES (IVIES), ASCENTS -> A(C)CENTS (BREVE) and got no further.
I wrote those five across words as themers, but couldn’t see anything other than Burro in Burrowed, which could be construed as ASS. I looked for other examples of synonyms for chump. I saw oaf and boer (boor) and maybe Borat. Thought maybe BOOBY could be the answer. Never got beyond that. And all this time the answer was right there in those five acrosses I first wrote down. Touché!
I got hung up on INEPTNESS/NESS, BURROWED/OWED, GRANADA/DENADA, ERODE/ODER. Also kept thinking SHOWDOWNS might be an instruction of some sort.
Well, not only that each letter in CHUMP appeared in the grid only once, but appeared once in each theme fill.