Marie Kelly’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Taken In”—Dave Sullivan’s write-up
WSJ Contest – 4/7/17 – “Taken In”
- 17a. [Clarify], MAKE PLAIN – “in pain” (remove an L)
- 31a. [Hopeless undertaking], LOST CAUSE – “in case” (remove a U)
- 39a. [1964 hit for Andy Williams], DEAR HEART – “in heat” (remove an R)
- 55a. [Any of eight on a brilliant-cut diamond], STAR FACET – “in fact”
(remove an E)
My first thought was to consider the title and I realized that “in” could be used with the second words of each phrase, if you remove one letter from them. As I went through them above, it wasn’t until I came to “in heat” that I recalled entering that in the grid! So we actually have four more theme-related entries:
- 21a. [As it happens], IN FACT
- 27a. [Like some noisy cats], IN HEAT
- 43a. [To be safe], IN CASE
- 51a. [Hurting], IN PAIN
So if you take the letters removed from the four theme words, you get LURE, which is indeed a way to “take someone (or something) in,” most likely a fish. I’m sort of surprised these extra four theme entries were present, as I had hitched my wagon onto the solution even before noticing they were in the grid. (Perhaps my subconscious noticed them?) At least we seem to be moving away from the asterisks in these kind of clues, so I am grateful for small steps towards crunchier metas.
As for the rest of the puzzle, YAYAS certainly sets a tone at 1A, doesn’t it? I had TOGAS (and TOGAE) for a while before TUNIC for [Roman’s attire]. I thought [Canaries’ owner] for SPAIN was an inspired clue and learned that Tulsa’s minor league sluggers are called the DRILLERS. I imagine Sarah Palin is a fan.
I spent way too much time working on this puzzle. But I finally got the meta on Sunday with about 6 hours to spare. In retrospect, I liked it alot and I should have gotten it sooner.
I solved this the other way around. While I was filling in the grid, I got to INCASE and thought, “Hmmm…. that’s the third IN____ thing I’ve seen in this puzzle. Odd.” Then, when I got to INPAIN, I looked at the title, which I really had not thought about since I printed-off the puzzle earlier in the day. I figured from the title that the IN at the beginning of each of these was like a flag for the four-letter word following. So I wrote them all out, in order, one after another in a column. Looking at them for a while I drew the disappointing conclusion that there was nothing there. So I set it aside.
Later, the thought occurred to me that these could be red herrings, and there might be other words with IN embedded into them. So I looked again, starting in the northwest. Bang! MAKEPLAIN. Just as I was writing this down I realized that the second word was a match for inPAIN if I dropped the L. All my staring at the IN____ list caused these four to be very much in my mind, so I went looking for another, then another, then yup — four of them. And that was it. I had it.
Noticed that if you drop the ‘n’ in Taken In, “Take in” is the right tense for Lure. Seemed like a great lock to me.