Good luck to everyone competing in today’s Boswords Summer Tournament. I will not be able to take part in the proceedings today, but I will be purchasing the set of puzzles for solving at home.
Today’s crossword has a longer than normal set of meta instructions: “One of this puzzle’s theme answers is the wrong one. The answer to this week’s metapuzzle is the theme answer that should replace it, formed by combining two entries in the completed grid.” There are seven obvious theme answers that feature some bizarre answers and clues:
- 24A: [“Gangnam Style” rapper, when he’s musically moody?] is EMO PSY.
- 33A: [Uncouth person’s messy room?] is BOOR’S STY.
- 52A: [Big car belonging to a red Muppet?] is ELMO SUV.
- 71A: [Powerful card that’s no longer in my possession?] is ACE I LOST.
- 91A: [Top-shelf prom suit?] is BEST TUX.
- 106A: [“Between Mr. Vigoda and Mr. Erwin, which actor do you prefer?”?] is “ABE OR STU?”
- 122A: [“Bring me Hawaiian tuna right away!”?] is “AHI NOW.”
You’ll need a few insights to crack this meta. Note that each of the strange theme answers is fairly short (just six to eight letters long) and they don’t seem to take up much real estate in the grid (only 50 squares total). Surely there must be some other theme material besides the final two grid entries that form the meta answer? There is, but focus on these seven answers for now.
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The first key step is to recognize the odd pattern that these seven theme answers have in common. Look closely at their letters: Each theme answer’s letters are arranged in alphabetical order. ACE I LOST starts with an A and progresses through the alphabet with each successive letter. KING I LOST wouldn’t be an acceptable answer since the first letter is a K and the second letter is an I, but I comes before K in the alphabet.
One of these alphabetized answers is the wrong one, so how do we determine which one it is? A good way to figure it out is to circle or highlight them in the completed puzzle. Notice how they’re all in the center or on the right side of the grid? Usually you will find theme material on the left side as well. In fact, a few of them (BOOR’S STY, ACE I LOST and “ABE OR STU?”) sit in rows where there’s only one other answer. Look at BOOR’S STY and the word immediately to its left, SOB STORY, and hopefully here you will get the second important insight: The normal grid entry just before a strange theme answer is an anagram of that theme answer. This holds true in all cases except one of them:
- MYOPES at 23A is an anagram of EMO PSY.
- SOB STORY at 30A is an anagram of BOOR’S STY.
- VOLUMES at 50A is an anagram of ELMO SUV.
- SOCIETAL at 69A is an anagram of ACE I LOST.
- SUBTEXT at 89A is an anagram of BEST TUX.
- SABOTEUR at 103A is an anagram of “ABE OR STU?”
- However, JACOBY at 120A is *not* an anagram of “AHI NOW.” This is the pair that breaks the pattern, so AHI NOW is the wrong theme answer.
The final step is to find the pair of grid entries that would fix the pattern. You might be tempted to look for an anagram of AHI NOW that forms a real word or phrase, but you won’t find one. What you need to do is apply the same alphabetizing pattern to JACOBY. Do that and you’ll end up with ABC JOY, and look, there’s ABC at 16D: [Jackson 5 hit with the lyric “easy as 1 2 3” and “simple as do re mi”] and JOY at 118D: [What you might jump for]. Those two grid entries combine to form the correct meta answer.
Words whose letters are in alphabetical order has been fodder for other puzzles before. Peter Gordon once wrote a metapuzzle for Fireball Crosswords called “Ordered Pairs” where you had to notice the alphabetical pattern in each word of a two-word phrase and name a cookie brand whose two words used the same pattern (CHIPS AHOY). Matt Gaffney used the same idea for a metapuzzle last year called “That’s an Order,” albeit with some different theme answers, but ultimately landing on CHIPS AHOY as the final meta answer as well.
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The constraint I put on myself is that I wanted to find strange alphabetized phrases that could anagram to real words, and unfortunately many of them weren’t as accommodating toward that goal as I would have hoped. There’s only a relatively small handful of words whose letters appear in alphabetical order — just 860 of them, according to a 2019 corpus of English words allowed at Scrabble tournaments. There were additional proper nouns and phrases that I found in Adam Aaronson’s Wordlisted resource, like AAA CELL and AM NOT, but most of my time planning this puzzle was spent testing different combinations of those alphabetized words and hoping some of them could form real anagrams.
Even just settling on a meta answer was tricky enough, since ideally you’d want it to be something that feels apt and connected to the puzzle’s core concept. ABC JOY is obviously a nonsense phrase that I wouldn’t expect to be a final meta answer in just about any other puzzle, but it seemed like the most appropriate answer that suggested alphabetizing letters and the joy of crosswords and, critically, it yielded a real word when anagrammed.
One other clue and answer of note that has nothing to do with the meta: 48D: [“Fateful Findings” filmmaker Breen] is NEIL Breen. I’ve been waiting to drop a reference to him in one of my crosswords for several years, but even though I’ve had the answer NEIL in at least four previous Post puzzles, I just never gave the final green light to mention one of his films in them until now. They’re perhaps not for everyone — they’re low-budget movies with, to be generous, not the best scripts ever written … but they can make for a fun time to watch with friends, even if only for morbid curiosity. “Fateful Findings” was the first one I saw; here’s an 18-minute compilation of some of the scenes, and as one of the top comments on YouTube says, “Of all the films ever made, this is definitely one of them.”
What did you think?
