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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “Third Word Heard”
Instructions: This week’s contest answer is an 11-letter word starting with B.
Answer: BITTERSWEET
I came up with this idea while reading my 17-month-old son a book about opposites. They used rhyming pairs like “young and old” + “hot and cold,” and my meta antennae, which are always on low-level alert, started buzzing like crazy.
So, first insight, with a nudge from the rhyming title: antonyms for the two words in each of the theme entries rhyme with each other.
17-A: [Romantic relationship between two corrupt politicians?] = CROOKED LOVE. straight-hate.
21-A: [Shoving someone when your heart’s not really into it?] = EMPTY PUSH. full-pull.
40-A: [Enormous cohort of centenarians?] = OLD MANY. new-few. A little rough on the syntax there but this is what the crossword gods demanded.
54-A: [Illness that requires a ton of kleenexes?] = MESSY COLD. neat-heat. A bit tricky since it could’ve been adjective hot instead of noun heat, but since the others all rhymed you knew we were using COLD as a noun.
63-A: [Slightly more likely to vote in favor of?] = LESS AGAINST. More for. Huge ding here since I have “more” in the clue and then also as one of the derived words. If I were rating this puzzle on a 5-star system I’d ding it .5 just for this. I had seen this and used a more-less phrasing, but on one of the later revisions I forgot that/why I’d done this and “fixed” it. Bad mistake.
Second insight: exactly one entry in the grid rhymes with these two antonyms. That’s the “third word heard” of the title. Like so:
Straight-hate-SATE
Full-pull-WOOL
New-few-EWE
Neat-heat-EAT
More-for-THOR
The first letters of those spell SWEET; add its antonym and you get contest answer BITTERSWEET, found by 316 solvers. Unfortunately this answer did not yield a strong click for many solvers. The main two issues were 1) that the final mechanism is a bit odd, tacking the antonym of sweet onto the front of it instead of after it, and 2) “bitter” and “sweet” are not as precise antonyms as, say, push/pull and love/hate. That was unfortunate, though there wasn’t really much else it could be, so many solvers submitted BITTERSWEET but with more of an “I guess that has to be it” than a confident “that’s definitely right.” Though until the Hail Marys started coming in on Tuesday the correct answers were running at 98-99%, so most who saw the idea got there in the end.
So a bittersweet puzzle for me, as a nice idea was marred by rather unfortunate execution.
Tougher-than-I-realized Week 3, so we’re returning to Week 2 levels for this puzzle, then we’ll pick up back with a Week 4 after that.
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen at random from the 316 correct entries received, is Patsy Coffin of Sudbury, Mass. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil, and notepad set, Patsy will also receive a signed copy of my book Fast & Fun Mini Crosswords.
LUCKY MARCH:
Remember — it’s Lucky March, so you don’t need to run the table this month to be eligible for monthly prizes; you just need to go 3-for-5 or better. And there’ll be 13 prizes instead of 10, so if you’ve never won before or it’s been a long time, this could be it!
NEW META SITE:
Constructor Peter Washington has a new meta site up! Very cool. New puzzles will appear every week or two. You probably recall this striking meta from last year’s Guest Constructor Month, and I’ll warn you that Peter’s inaugural puzzle at the new site is tough!
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a five-letter plural noun.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.