"Mark My Words" December 15, 2023

[auee89]

Whoops. I submitted punctuation. No letters needed.

[kimbo.k]

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.

Whelp, I got it right. Just didn’t think of “typewriting” as writing, I suppose.

[muggleunity]

I took a little rabbit hole that led me to the right direction.

I started with "Mark My Words." Found all clues that contain the word "Word" or "Words." The down clues with "word(s)" intersect the long words in five places, and those letters are t, d, e, i, and l. This unscrambles to "tilde." Wait, that word is in the first long clue....

[Bob cruise director]

Imagine this. I filled in the grid and totally missed the five punctuation marks in the themers. I highlighted the themers in the usual yellow but I had to go from there. But where??

By the way, significant googling was required for all of this.

I first thought of the standard alternate answers trick. I quickly noticed that the Artemis mission has two goals. Not only the Moon Colony that was the answer to 56A but sending a man to Mars. And we have 43D MAS so that gives me a R. Clearly we are on to something.

Now what. Tesla does not market its outlets as show rooms but as Tesla Stores so clearly I have to do something to find a seven letter word in the grid with "stores" in it. HMMM - can't find it but it must be there. I will look in a bit

Now we move on to the Kardashians of which I have zero knowledge except from doing crosswords and a random picture. So I found that there were four of them - not realizing that Kris was the mother. Voila!! Two in the clue, one in 36A and the fourth one (boy was I feeling smart) - 37D has KIA so that gives me an R. Never mind that I had to add a letter to get Mars and swap out a letter to get Kris. A minor detail that I will work on in a bit. HMMM - I noticed that the letters KRIS were in the answer to 36A so more to pursue later.

So we move on to Atari of which I know little except when my son was of that age 40+ years ago. So I looked up games for Atari and found a bunch - Centipede, Mario and Pacman were the most famous. Nothing obvious but clearly I must be on the right track as I am going four for four.

Now the problem. With googling, I found it was Jean-Claude Van Damme but that came with a major problem. He only did one movie in 2007 and that was Until Death. So maybe there was another wrinkle that had to be pursued.

By now it was Friday morning so time to update the spreadsheet to find how many were on the ship and shore. Crushed as the postings were up to Page 8. And I got an email that solving buddy @MaineMarge was on the shore so at least I have a life boat to get to.

So I tried several more things which led absolutely nowhere so I sent Marge an email with all these ramblings for which I received a well deserved dope slap. It read (or should have read but Marge is too nice a lady) something like this - "have you ever done one of these before,
Stupid. Look in the themers."

From there is went pretty quickly but 3 hours of googling and marking up the paper I will never get back. DUH

[gdshort]

I had the correct answer but did not submit it because it did not fit the requirements, A smile can communicate, but "writing" is a stretch too far. Ah well, I am sure I would have got a mug too....

[Scott M]

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 submitted SMILE but I agree with you. I tried for a while to find a Y to make it SMILEY, and considered EMOTICON or EMOJI, but couldn't see a mechanism to make that leap.

[Joepickett]

Guess I was pageanted. And I killed my Sunday slogging through the cryptic. Oh well.

[otlaolap]

The last two characters of the official WSJ solution (see above or the physical paper) made my day.

[DBMiller]

The best smiley I could make from the five themers was

~/:-,

And my favorite emoticon, me, when I wore glasses, with my beard and beret...

{8^{o>

[Ergcat]

The best smiley I could make from the five themers was

~/:-,

And my favorite emoticon, me, when I wore glasses, with my beard and beret...

{8^{o>

It’s uncanny how much that looks like you with glasses, beard and beret!

[femullen]

I wonder, now, had I submitted as my solution this, 8^) , would I lose points for spelling?

[Geezer Weezer]

Taking 66 across as a clue, stringing together such characters, I submitted EXPLETIVES.

[MajordomoTom]

Imagine this. I filled in the grid and totally missed the five punctuation marks in the themers. I highlighted the themers in the usual yellow but I had to go from there. But where??
...

From there is went pretty quickly but 3 hours of googling and marking up the paper I will never get back. DUH


smile.jpg

nomination for rabbit award

[pchow13]

I had the correct answer but did not submit it because it did not fit the requirements, A smile can communicate, but "writing" is a stretch too far. Ah well, I am sure I would have got a mug too....

I had the same dilemma… I found SMILE but in my opinion, “smile” did not fit the prompt… the emoticons that you write/type are known as “smileys” or “smiley faces” - I don’t think anyone refers to them as just “smiles”… so I took it to mean that smile was supposed to nudge you toward the correct answer/terminology of SMILEY

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley

[vandono]

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.”

My youngest son sent me a link to "Internet Artifacts" on neal.fun ("a tiny website by neal"). It has a page for the first smiley: https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/first-smiley/

[RobM]

Yeah, I thought that "something you can write without letters" was a prompt that the puzzle answer was the emoticon of a : followed by a ), (which when I try to type it, this message board converts into the emoji ), not SMILE, so that's what I submitted. I still think it's a better answer.

[Eric Porter]

I graduated from CMU.
I submitted SMILE, but I believe EMOTICON is a better answer to the prompt.

I also graduated from CMU. I don't know if I've seen it in a crossword before.

[C=64]

I submitted both formats.

[Ergcat]

I graduated from CMU.
I submitted SMILE, but I believe EMOTICON is a better answer to the prompt.

I also graduated from CMU. I don't know if I've seen it in a crossword before.

I also graduated from CMU twice — undergrad and grad!

[HunterX]

I graduated from CMU.
I submitted SMILE, but I believe EMOTICON is a better answer to the prompt.

I also graduated from CMU. I don't know if I've seen it in a crossword before.

I also graduated from CMU twice — undergrad and grad!

Don't leave me out of the Tartan reunion! I went to the Business School there (then called the Graduate School of Industrial Administration) in the latter part of the '80's, while my ex-wife was getting her PhD in the School of Computer Science. Only school in the country to offer a scholarship for playing the bagpipes!