XWord Muggles Forum

Floated ashore Thursday but have been busy with birthday things for one of my sweet daughters, a graduation and a major implementation at work.

After all of that, I'll have a nice single malt. Maybe a Tomintoul.

I spent a good amount of time staring at this one before it hit me! Nice to make it to shore before time ran out.

Solved the grid Friday evening and got nowhere with the meta. Looked at it last night and immediately saw what I was looking for. Went through another step that couldn’t have come together by accident, but didn’t have that 100% feeling enough to say I’m ashore. I’ll turn in my guess and find out tomorrow, but sounds like I may be in a “boat” with others.

On the beach

Ashore. Was basically what I thought the construct of the meta was, but not exactly. Clever as always

SMILE can be expressed by an emoticon ! And I think that clue 1d CMU was A confirmation!

From Britannica.com:
“Emoticons are punctuation marks, letters, and numbers used to create pictorial icons that generally display an emotion or sentiment.

The emoticon came into being after a joke went wrong at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1982. A gag about a fake mercury spill posted to an online message board sent the university into a tizzy, and because of this confusion, Dr. Scott E. Fahlman suggested that jokes and nonjokes be marked by two sets of characters we now recognize as standard emoticons: the smiley face :-) and the frowning face :-(. After this, emoticons were a big hit among Internet users.”

How is a smile something you can write? My answer was emoticon, which is the representation of a word like smile through punctuation. All the punctuation hidden in the long answers are used in emoticons, and the smile is the classic emoticon.

I still think “punctuation “ is a better answer. I don’t care for the other answer.

FWIW Department:
“Miles” can also be expressed in numbers as well as letters. The numbers appear on mile MARKers.
Congrats to those who solved.

I submitted EMOTICON

Ergcat wrote: ↑Mon Dec 18, 2023 12:05 am SMILE can be expressed by an emoticon ! And I think that clue 1d CMU was A confirmation!

From Britannia.com:
“Emoticons are punctuation marks, letters, and numbers used to create pictorial icons that generally display an emotion or sentiment.

The emoticon came into being after a joke went wrong at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1982. A gag about a fake mercury spill posted to an online message board sent the university into a tizzy, and because of this confusion, Dr. Scott E. Fahlman suggested that jokes and nonjokes be marked by two sets of characters we now recognize as standard emoticons: the smiley face :) and the frowning face :-(. After this, emoticons were a big hit among Internet users.”

WOW this is why I love this forum! Thank you for this very interesting factoid! I did solve the meta but I did not know this CMU backstory. LOVE IT! :) ;)

I almost had the right answer

I submitted smile, but was torn about submitting smiley face -- from the prompt.

Couldn't find a mechanism to get smiley face so went with smile. I guess that means I'll get the mug

Also, the letter "I" where the emoticon's "eyes" would be - happy coincidence or not, mind blown.

2 for 2 since discovering this new obsession.

SMILE, MILES, LIMES, SLIME. I still don't get it.

8^(

TGWWNP!

Thank God we were not pageanted

I was going to guess "music," but step 1 was clear on what the available letters were. A typed glyph never occurred to me. Alas, another week at sea.

But while we're on this subject, here are some other "typos" I sometimes use.

Happy

8^)

Joyous

8^D

Giddy

<|^D

Sad

8^(

Angry

>8^(

Irate

>8^<

And, my favourite, asleep

|^o

A bakery we walked past on Saturday! We don't normally walk past bakeries but we were on our way to Mimi's Tea Cottage for a sumptuous tea (sandwiches, scones, mini-desserts) after a performance of "The Nutcracker." Mark is a VERY good sport -- who, by the way, really wanted the meta answer to be either SIMILE or EMAILS (because the latter are written without postal letters).

I must say, I was extremely relieved to have confirmed that I submitted the correct answer.

In my mind one can draw or type a SMILE, but I've never in my life mentioned writing one, so I was unsure about my answer.

PHEW!