meta 3ish
hello, and welcome to episode #854 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “What Kind of a Person…?”. this week’s instructions ask for one of the 25 largest cities in the Southern Hemisphere. what are the theme answers?
- {Kinshasa is on it (3)} CONGO RIVER.
- {They play the Chicago Blackhawks tonight (2)} WINNIPEG JETS. well, several nights ago now, one presumes. i didn’t fact-check this clue, though.
- {Eldest child of a Spice Girl and a soccer superstar (1)} BROOKLYN BECKHAM.
- {Flowering ornamental plants (4)} APPLES OF PERU. never heard of these.
- {It features a proa (that ship you see in crosswords) and a coconut tree (5)} FLAG OF GUAM. i haven’t seen PROA in a crossword in quite some time—it is very old-school crosswordese.
what next? well, even before i started the puzzle, the title and instructions put me in mind of demonyms, and seeing a place name in each of the theme answers confirmed that i should be looking for demonyms (as in, “what kind of a person is from congo/winnipeg/brooklyn/peru/guam?”). the parenthetical numbers are a permutation of 1 to 5, so let’s use that as an ordering:
- (1) someone from brooklyn is a brooklynite. so we’re looking for ITE… which is hiding in the entry {Web locale} SITE, along with a stray S.
- (2) someone from winnipeg is a winnipegger, so GER… yep, there it is in {First name of a Spice Girl} GERI halliwell, with a spare I. (not the same spice girl, incidentally, who’s the mother of brooklyn beckham; that would be victoria beckham, a.k.a. posh.)
- (3) someone from either congo is (a) congolese, as you might remember from this previous demonym-themed mgwcc. now, LESE isn’t in the grid, which is a bit of a twist. but with a bit of a twist, you can find all of those letters, plus a D, in {English city that sounds like it’s winning} LEEDS.
- (4) someone from peru is a peruvian. where’s VIAN? again, nowhere—except it’s hiding backwards in {Likely to get swindled, maybe} NAIVE, along with an E.
- (5) someone from guam is a guamanian. ANIAN, again anagrammed and with an extra letter (R), is in {C.S. Lewis milieu} NARNIA.
this is a slightly ungainly combination of hiddens and anagrams and one reversal, along with an extra letter in each case. but i suppose all of them fall under the general umbrella of transadditions even if some of the anagrams are degenerate. the extra letters spell out SIDER, and matt has done us the kindness of giving us the order, so we didn’t have to do any more undirected anagramming. the meta answer is therefore sydney, australia, a very large southern-hemisphere city whose residents are called sydneysiders.
now, the mechanism for the previous demonym meta (see link above) was not that different from this one, but it played very tough—it was a week 5 that matt called “week 6” difficulty. this one was easier than that one—the place names were in the marked theme entries and the demonym suffixes hidden in the grid, rather than vice versa, and i think that makes a difference—but not that much easier in my opinion. and yet this is a week 2, with what seems like a healthy get rate. what’s responsible for the difference? it could just be (at least in part) that some of us remember the other puzzle—although it was 12.5 years ago! i also think the title was significantly more helpful this time around, strongly hinting at demonyms instead of only obliquely hinting at the combining form “demo-“.
the fill on this one was, i have to say, pretty strained. or, as matt put it, a {Tough grind, like a crossword grid with lots of cruddy entries} SLOG. i’m going to interpret that clue as an acknowledgment/apology, so i won’t dwell on the imperfections. SEE IF I don’t!
that’s all i’ve got this week. how’d you like this one?
I, too, recalled MGWCC #204 after finding CONGOLESE in this puzzle. I did not solve that meta, so I was happy to get my revenge and solve this one.
Thanks, joon — 328 correct entries this week, of which 265 were solo solves.
I thought I had done a demonym meta before but couldn’t Google my way to it so I figured my mind was playing tricks on me (until a solver pointed it out).
Query: Is it common knowledge that a Sydney person is a -sider? Or is there some other hint that it is Sydney other than the suffix? I did not solve this week but, if I had, and got to sider, I wouldn’t have any idea where to go. I see there is a list of demonyms for cities on Wikipedia but it is really long.
I figured it out due to the fact it was English so it was going to be a city in Australia or South Africa. I did have to do a little more Googling then I would’ve liked to solve the meta.
I agree with Mac… even knowing -sider I wouldn’t have gotten to Sydney.
i knew it, but i have been to sydney. as for “common knowledge”? i’m not sure such a thing actually exists.
otoh, if you got as far as -sider and still didn’t know the answer, it’s pretty solvable given the instructions. you don’t have to go through every city in the world, just the largest cities in the southern hemisphere until you get to sydney.
Okay. So I get a list of the 25 largest cities in the Southern Hemisphere (oops, doesn’t seem to exist in that form) so I settle on any list of Southern Hemisphere cities. Then I take them one by one and google what their residents are called – – Sea Paulosider?, Jakartasider?, Limasider?, Santiagosider? I hit Sydney at number 7. Seems like a lot of googling for a Week 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adjectivals_and_demonyms_for_cities
control-f sider
It’s an English word, so you can be fairly sure the city is in South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand, and it has to be one of the largest cities in that country. I started with Johannesberg and Cape Town before moving on to Australia and vaguely recalling the term “Sydneysider” from somewhere or another. Plus it’s alliterative!
Also, you can search within the Wikipedia page for
sider.I asked Google Gemini.
I did not know this, either.
I went to perplexity.ai and posed this question:
Where is a person from whose demonym ends with SIDER?
Perplexity replied:
A person whose demonym ends with “sider” is from Sydney, Australia. The demonym for someone from Sydney is “Sydneysider”
The title was all-important for me, I never would have gotten anywhere without it. Luckily I’d heard of Sydneysider so that part came pretty easily once SIDER dropped out. Not sure I’d call it a week two but happy to get it!
Without going into a long explanation, the Google search term
demonym “*SIDER”
would have pointed immediately to Sydney as the home of Sydneysiders.
Hope that proves useful, down the road.
I tried that search and it did not immediately take me anywhere useful, which is why I went to perplexity.ai
I’m not doubting you for a second, but I am curious as to why Google would have produced an entirely different search result for you (Personalization aside, because we do know that Google generates ad revenue in their “featured results”.
I wonder, did you try your search exactly as I described it? The asterisk, the word SIDER in caps, and everything?
demonym “*SIDER”
Weird.
I tried it myself for another data point – the quotation marks are the determining factor. Without them, you get a bunch of articles on demonyms and various meanings of “sider” but no top results pointing to Sydney.