![]() The other two trouble spots were minor, and were not the puzzle's fault. "Stop it!" But the "it" is ambiguous and what the taunter wants you to "make" him do is also ambiguous and it just didn't play right. Make me what? I guess you are supposed to infer that the clue / answer is in response to a very specific demand, i.e. But I think this is one of those horseshoes/hand grenades situations, where meh, it's fine, good enough, and as I said at the outset, the structural consistency on this set of phrases elevates the theme, making any infelicities much more forgivable.īefore that, I had trouble with " MAKE ME!," which is horribly clued ( 4D: "What are you gonna do about it?!"). Just doesn't have the obvious emphatic spokenness that the theme seems to require. ![]() And nothing in the clue points toward a spoken context, so that themer really feels like an outlier. Maybe that behavior is speech, maybe it isn't. The one major problem I have with the theme set is that the first two themers are very much about speaking, whereas neither the clue on 47A: Be cause for serious concern, say, nor the answer ( RAISE A RED FLAG), are necessarily speech-related, so the "commentary" connection there feels particularly tenuous. This gives the set a thematic coherence that transcends the mere presence of colors. Yes, they all have colors, but more impressively, they all follow a strict " A " pattern. This theme has one thing going for it, and that's the parallel rhythms / structures of all the theme answers. The fill was (almost) all very easy, but it's Tuesday, and the thematic stuff provided sufficient crunch, so the easiness doesn't feel like a problem today. If the theme is thematically light, who cares? The grid is actually strong all on its own, with longer answers / showier corners than you usually see in a Tuesday. ![]() So there's another thing I learned today. I know the word well-the locus classicus of long words-but I never thought to inquire into what it means. The marquee moment here-the one truly inspired thing-is the breaking of ANTIDISESTABLI-/SHMENTARIANISM in half. The fact that self-criticism by the pedantic is rare probably accounts for this word going largely unheard. Anyway, SESQUIPEDALIAN seems like a word that would only ever be used by people who were actually most inclined to break out SESQUIPEDALIAN words. My high school English teacher used to say (as many of yours probably said), "don't use half-dollar words when a nickel word will do." This was when half dollars were in wide circulation. So if nothing else I was happy to have relearned a word, and very happy to have read Merriam-Webster's note on the word, which puts it in proper (critically derisive) context. In fact, I'd forgotten entirely what "SESQUI-" meant, even in SESQUICENTENNIAL, which I knew was a -50 number, not a round 100, but I couldn't even remember which one. gah what is that word?!" Eventually as I was filling it in from the back end, it came to me, but I realized as I was writing it that I if I'd ever known its definition, I had totally forgotten it. I read the clue and thought "oh, this is. ![]() No, not OBSTREPEROUSLY, that's a basic word (though I managed to misspell it at first go). It plays mostly like a very, very easy themeless with one possibly unknown / forgotten / hard-to-spell word strung across the top of it. Well this is different, and different is good.
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