meta 10 minutes?
hello, and welcome to episode #860 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 puzzle called “Half-Dozen of the Other”. this week’s instructions ask for a six-letter word beginning with C. what were the theme answers?
- {Flan-like dessert} CUSTARD PIE.
- {1954 role for which Humphrey Bogart earned a Best Actor nomination} CAPTAIN QUEEG.
- {Lead singer on “Friend of the Devil”} JERRY GARCIA of the grateful dead.
- {Southern dessert} PEACH COBBLER.
- {Ingredient in pupusas} MAIZE FLOUR.
okay, so i think i know what the meta answer is, and i understand part of the mechanism, but there is something here i’m not really understanding. or at least, i think there is, because what i can grasp doesn’t quite hold together. let’s piece it together.
the theme answers themselves don’t really have much to tell us—three of them are foods, but the others aren’t. thinking about 6-letter C words (and food) led me to CHERRY garcia, the ben & jerry’s flavor named after the grateful dead singer, but that didn’t really go anywhere.
what led me in the right direction was thinking about some of the other clues in the puzzle, the ones that triggered my spidey sense for clues deliberately written to allow alternate answers. here are the ones that caught my eye, all of which turned out to be relevant:
- {Subject studied by Gandhi} EVIL. this is not a normal way to clue this entry.
- {First name on “Pollock” posters} VAL. apparently VAL kilmer was in this film, playing willem de kooning. but the two big names are in the lead roles, pollock himself (that was ed harris) and his wife lee krasner (that would be marcia gay harden).
- {A deli may sell it} LOX. or a lot of other things.
- {1970s-’80s band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame} ELO. many options for this one, too.
- {Word in big letters on maps of New England} RHODE. sure.
it turns out that you can change one letter in one of the words in each theme answer to get an alternate answer to one of these clues. i don’t really know what the rhyme or reason is, but here’s what i’ve got:
- CUSTARD -> MUSTARD may also be sold in a deli, like LOX.
- QUEEG -> QUEEN is also a 1970s-80s band in the R&RHoF, like ELO.
- GARCIA -> MARCIA gay harden, as previously mentioned, from pollock, like VAL.
- PEACH -> PEACE, a subject studied by gandhi, like EVIL.
- MAIZE -> MAINE, a word on new england maps, like RHODE.
now, there are several things you could do here: take the original letter (CNGHZ), the changed letter (MNMEN), or the first letter of the other answer in the grid (LEVER). the last of these actually spells a word, which is interesting. it’s not a 6-letter C word, but CLEVER is. so i think that’s the meta answer… but i don’t fully understand why.
in particular, i don’t know what’s going on with the title. it’s half an adage (six of one…), but i couldn’t connect that adage in any way to the meta mechanism. the meta answer is indeed six letters, as required by the instructions, but the title didn’t help in any way. LEVER is one of the six classical simple machines, which is interesting to me, but that didn’t seem to be relevant either—at least, i did not see any references to the others (screw, wedge, inclined plane, wheel & axle, pulley).
another reason i think i’m missing something is that there seems to be an arbitrariness to the changed letters. neither the original words (CUSTARD, QUEEG, GARCIA, PEACH, MAIZE) nor the altered words (MUSTARD, QUEEN, MARCIA, PEACE, MAINE) have anything in common, do they? oh… well, actually, that’s not true. the latter five words are all members of notable sextets. yes, i think this is it: colonel MUSTARD is one of the six clue suspects, QUEEN is one of the six chess pieces, MARCIA is one of the brady bunch kids, PEACE is one of the six nobel prize categories, and MAINE is one of the six new england states. so that is the actual theme, and in that context, getting to LEVER (a member of another group of six) and then CLEVER makes much more of a click.
okay, so this is definitely right. the mechanism still feels a little scattershot—i feel like it’s something of a flaw that you can (as i did) arrive at the answer without really grokking the groups-of-six concept that ties it all together. i can envisage an alternate mechanism where you had to arrive at MUSTARD, QUEEN, MARCIA, PEACE, MAINE, and then somehow find a different member of each sextet to arrive at the meta answer instead of just finding another entry in the grid with a clue that could fit it. but that’s probably a week 5+ meta.
that’s all i’ve got. how’d you all like this one?
Several days of brain cudgeling got me nowhere near the answer, but I did make a fun wordplay discovery I hadn’t noticed before. In the course of wondering whether it was deliberate not to mention the movie for which Bogart had been nominated, it emerged that part of the movie title is hidden in the answer: CAptaIN quEeg. For whatever that’s worth…
Wow, Joon! I thought some solvers would piece the whole thing together bit-by-bit in one of several ways, but I didn’t think anyone would do a complete 180 like that. But very cool.
190 right answers this week, on point for a 4/5 meta.
I was especially happy with the last step, where you only get the C from the prompt itself. Not sure that has been done before, though some solvers found it odd.
I was on the right track but changed Jerry to Jerky for 6d Clunky
My “in” to this meta turned out to be irrelevant and ultimately a stumbling block!
Given the title and the prompt, I looked for sixes, and found one in 49A: {Phone 6} MNO. Only once I saw that did I change letters to members of the MNO set, getting Mustard, queeN, Marcia, and maiNe. But I thought I then needed two Os to round out the 6! So despite the obvious bonkers-ness of the clue for EVIL and the fit with PeacE, I spent far too looking for an E-starting clue answer for POach. And then I wondered if the final answer would be CLEVER or, for some reason, CLOVER. (Spent a while looking for alternates for CLOVER and LOVER, as well.)
But I finally gave in to the inevitable.
A couple of other solvers mentioned this too, Maggie! Insane red herring, completely unintended by me (and unknown to me until solvers pointed it out). Brutal, really — how could that not be relevant in a 6-themed puzzle?
I had the same experience.
+1 on the MNO, couldn’t find Poach (or Nobbler), saw Peace/EVIL, confusedly sent in CLEVER.
Can someone explain what the intended path through the meta is? Were we supposed to first notice that one word from each themer is one letter off from a member of a sextet? It’s just that none of those sextets are groups I think of as canonically 6. Like, there are groups of things that are famously a certain number: lots of 7s (seas, continents, dwarves, etc), 8 planets, etc. But these groups of 6 would never trigger my “oh that’s a group of 6 things.” They’re just one of a group of things.
Intended path was:
1) From the title, be thinking of the number 6
2) Notice that you can change a letter in each theme entry to get a member of a well-known sestet. I thought QUEEG/N, G/MARCIA or MAIZ/NE would be the most likely to be noticed first, and then the others aren’t tough once you see the idea
3) Notice that each of these new words can satisfy a clue, get LEVER
4) Realize this must be the right path because a LEVER is also part of a noted sestet (simple machines). But where to get a sixth letter, as required by the prompt?
5) The prompt itself gives you the C, so CLEVER it is
I got to LEVER and then CLEVER without thinking of the groups of six at all. So I was stuck for a while thinking that there should be some next step that would connect with the title and explain where the C comes from.
One of my solving buddies noted that the 6th letter of 1-down is a C, so there’s the “six of one” part of the saying. I really liked that and wondered if Matt originally had that as part of the mechanism instead of just telling us to add the C.
I’m another of those who never realized the alternates were part of sextets. And also one of those who tried really hard to make something of MNO.