Title: “Spider Dream”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a modified version of this puzzle’s title.
Answer: ARAÑA SUEÑO
Correct entries: 227 overall, of which 148 were solo solves

One of the worst-received puzzles in the 13 years of this series. This came as a complete surprise to me; there have been puzzles where I had an uneasy feeling going into publication and solvers did in fact wind up being very unhappy, but I was excited about this one and didn’t at all anticipate the reaction. So let’s do a post mortem and then a damnatio memoriae (i.e. never speak of this puzzle again).

Solvers got four clear theme entries, which were:

16-A: [Nickname for a guy who’s always procrastinating] = MR. TOMORROW

24-A: [12-month period where you eat nothing but a certain tropical fruit] = PINEAPPLE YEAR

40-A: [Possible reason to pass on an available apartment] = SMALL BATHROOM

54-A: [Student who learns a 27-letter alphabet] = SPANISH BOY

My intended path here was for solvers to notice that oddly-specific + crosswordy last clue. “Why is he telling us that the Spanish alphabet has 27 letters? And what is that 27th letter we don’t have in English?” The Ñ, so that’s interesting. Next aha moment was to notice that all eight words in theme entries, when translated into Spanish, take a tilde:

MR. = SEÑOR
TOMORROW – MAÑANA
PINEAPPLE = PIÑA
YEAR = AÑO
SMALL = PEQUEÑO
BATHROOM = BAÑO
SPANISH = ESPAÑOL
BOY = NIÑO

Some solvers didn’t like having to translate all these into another language, but most of these are known by most Americans (certainly enough of them to suss out the tilde pattern) so I didn’t really buy that criticism about the puzzle.

Next step: instructions asked for a “modified version of this puzzle’s title,” so the natural thing to do was translate “Spider Dream” into Spanish. Lo and behold, both words have tildes: Spider is ARAÑA and dream is SUEÑO, making that “modified version of this puzzle’s title” our contest answer.

So what were the problems? Well the main one was that a large number of solvers got to this point but weren’t sure whether there was another step. So they wasted lots of time looking for something more that didn’t exist, and were understandably annoyed by this. Browsing this painful-for-me-to-read thread will convey the tone:

https://www.xword-muggles.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1209

Not how things are supposed to run around here, to say the least. I thought that the click would be 100% from a) both “Spider” and “Dream” having a tilde in their Spanish translations and b) that it fit the prompt’s requirement of a “modified version of this puzzle’s title” so well. But as the emails and solving notes and forum comments came in over the weekend…well, if it’s any consolation, this puzzle ruined my weekend as well!

There were a few main issues:

1) Part of my rationale for the meta-click being strong for ARAÑA SUEÑO is that the tilde is a rare letter in Spanish; it only appears in a few dozen words. But this is probably not common knowledge so softened the click considerably.

2) From just the numbers, this meta was about perfect for Week 4, with 148 solo solves and 227 total. But this was strongly bifurcated into those who saw the idea very quickly and those who were probably not going to see it at all, so many solvers got the tildes and translation quickly but then thought: “Week 4, so it can’t be this easy; must be missing a step” and went off in search for a next step that wasn’t there. I was even surprised by a few solvers who told me they got the tildes-in-translation idea even before getting to the last theme entry! This amazes me, since there wasn’t any good reason I can see to decide to translate all those into Spanish.

So anyway, my deepest apologies to those who were irritated by this meta. There’s a lot of trust required between meta writer and meta solver since so much time may be invested on the solver’s part and they’ve got to have faith that the hunt is both fair and satisfying. Cases like this erode that trust. These things balance on a knife-edge and occasionally we get what happened last week. I’ll live and learn and I hope you can forgive and forget!

OCTOBER IS THE TENTH MONTH OF THE YEAR:

October is “TENTH MONTH” here at MGWCC. We have five Fridays. That is all.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a country in Africa.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.