Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Letters From Another Country” — Conrad’s writeup.
This we’re looking a five-letter country. I made a mental note to look for countries in the grid and eventually found the expected five. I struggled a bit to complete the grid, which usually indicates that the entries are crucial to the meta theme. I spotted rabbit when I encountered 22a’s clue: Country that shares a border with Hungary and Austria. I confidently filled in SLOVAKIA, only to realize that it didn’t work based on the cross entries. The answer had to be SLOVENIA (which also borders Hungary and Austria). Matt delivered a classic vaguely-clued meta this week. Here are the five countries who’s clues applied to other (equal length) countries:
WSJ Contest – 10.20.2024
- SLOVENIA: Country that shares a border with Hungary and Austria -> SLOVAKIA
- RWANDA: Country in Africa’s Great Lakes region -> UGANDA
- ALGERIA: Country due south of Luxembourg -> NIGERIA
- CHILE: Country on the Pacific Ocean -> CHINA
- OMAN: Country you can see from the top of the Burj Khalifa (on a clear day) -> IRAN
The paired countries differed by two letters, so I looked for 5-letter words in the grid containing four of those letters plus one more. Here they are in grid order:
- [S]NAKE -> SLOV(EN)A/SLOV(AK)IA
- [P]RIMO -> (OM)AN/(IR)AN
- LAN[A]I -> (AL)GERIA/(NI)GERIA
- AL[I]EN -> CHI(LE)/CHI(NA)
- WRU[N]G -> (RW)ANDA/(UG)ANDA
The fifth extra letter in the mapped grid entries spell our contest solution SPAIN. Fun meta! Five paired countries, each the same length and differing by two letters, then mapping back to five-letter grid entries to spell another country. And the title locked it in. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
A bit of inelegance in that the (AL)GERIA/(NI)GERIA pair also mapped to ALI[E]N, but it all worked out in the end.
I first thought Nepal,but then found Spain and decided it was in a more alphabetical order given the clues.
I got INDIA. Take the first letter of each replaced pair, AINNU. Replace two of its letters NU with DI and you get AINDI, INDIA.
Never would have made the leap to use all 4 letters together. Looked at every combination of the missing and replaced pairs alone
without success. An extra nudge in the title would have helped “letters exchanged between countries” maybe to emphasize both sets of letters are used rather than just one as is.
I also tried pairs but not quartets. Of course, in retrospect I feel as if I should have made that leap.
I had a lot of fun doing this meta. I had some Grrr moments. Started looking just for the two letters that had been switched (per the title) and found SNAKE for AK, but when I couldn’t locate a grid entry with UG in it from UGANDA, I thought maybe I was on the wrong track.
Seeing ASIA at 69A, I thought it must be a hint. So I was looking originally for an Asian nation. I almost went with INDIA because it was the only country name I could think of that you could pull from the five switched country names.
Then I saw WRUNG and realized the WR had to be from RWANDA, and there was the UG I needed too. It was an AHA moment. And I found the four others pretty quickly. Took me another minute or two to realize I needed to order them by the five-letter words to get SPAIN spelled out correctly. PRIMO puzzle!
My goodness, Matt, what a clever idea and execution. And to manage to find those country pairs that could be clued identically – wow! Really enjoyed this one… challenging but a great aha!
The meta is too convoluted for my 70-year-old brain. Puzzle was good, but the meta wasn’t fun. I’m gonna skip meta-solving from now on.
i agree with you . it was so much fun. i just sometimes not get the right ones, i am so dumb hahahaha