"Use Your Head" January 12, 2024

[Inca]

For those who have solved the meta: Do you "get" the title? To me it seems to be a bit off the mark

The title is often a good hint toward the first step in the meta process. However, this week -- hope it's late enough in the game I can say this without it being a spoiler -- the title didn't at all start me in the right direction. Only after I had the answer did the title fit.

I find that in general the title is more of a hint toward the metanism in a Shenk meta but more of just a clever title in the Gaffney metas. Regardless, the title usually "fits" the meta very well. But this week, it seems to me, that the title doesn't really apply 100%...or maybe I am missing something. That's why I asked.

Of the five "clues" in the puzzle, for 3 of them need you to add a body part that could be associated with the head (and also for the solution), however the other two add heart and hand which really aren't associated with the head at all...just to explain what I meant

[Dickie_Dunn]

After many hours of chasing white tails, I noticed SHARE, which is something an UNSELFISH person would do, right? AHA, that must be it - a regular old alternate answer hunt. This one, would test the thesaurus beyond anything I've attempted before.

WATCHFUL - easy... SANTA is watchful. I knew this was the track now.

IMPRUDENT - hmmm FRAUD? ILL? TSK? Maybe I'll come back to that one.

SENSITIVE - ILL/EMO/UPSET. Wow that is an abundance of options.

HESITANT - SAT ON. I like that one for sure.

IMPARTIAL - MEANLY - not only can it mean spiteful but also humbly, which if you bend your mind enough, you can get it to maybe mean what you think you want.

Order the first letters the same way as the perceived themers are: SSIESM.

Okay let's change SANTA to HOT, as in HOT on your trail (WATCHFUL), and then MEANLY to TRAIN as in if you TRAIN your judgement, it will be IMPARTIAL and I need a T to make a word.

SHIEST - is it an adjective? Not technically? I'm not an English major. I'll just use SHY. Some meta solvers are not SHY, especially to (sometimes) say when they didn't like the puzzle! I liked it - and would love to solve one like that, but not sure where I get the jump to add HEARTED to KIND (even after doing the above nonsense solve). Is that clue somewhere? Aside from the adjacent words being off by a letter to a word similar to the themer, I think not.

I did not submit because I knew that was a drowning effort. Congrats to those that solved! Until the next challenge.

[Jace54]

My solve process was delayed because some of the body parts are not part of the head, and therefore I thought they were not consistent with the puzzle title. Eventually I made the solve and saw that the title helped to confirm the answer and was not really a helpful clue for the solve.

I think that ‘body-building’ could have been an alternative title. Maybe the hyphen is not part of the normal use of that word, but it would have provided a hint about the solution process and it relates to all body parts.

[woozy]

What was weird about this was I had many rabbit holes ( Filling in the grid in the from the very beginning I put in HOTHEADED instead of sensitive and I seeing the HOT I thought the theme was ?-headed; I saw RASH in SHARE; and so on. I thought UNSELFISH was kind hearted but was annoyed that HEART is not part of the head) But all of these rabbit holes all orbited the actual metanism and led me straight to it. Kind Hearted and Even handed were just to clear to stay hidden (although oddly it was the weirdness of THINE that clinched that that had to be the mechanism.)

I thought that even though it was obscure and convoluted there were just so many gnats the force you to look in the correct place that I found this quite easy and straightforward. (I'm a bit surprised at the hate and confusion it generated... but then again after my Dec/first week of Jan Brain haze where I felt like a total dolt, it was nice to feel hot and on my game again [but this weekends Pun of A Kind and Pandora's Block put the humility back in me... *sigh*....])

[woozy]

My solve process was delayed because some of the body parts are not part of the head, and therefore I thought they were not consistent with the puzzle title. Eventually I made the solve and saw that the title helped to confirm the answer and was not really a helpful clue for the solve.

I think that ‘body-building’ could have been an alternative title. Maybe the hyphen is not part of the normal use of that word, but it would have provided a hint about the solution process and it relates to all body parts.

That the weren't all in the head *really* bugged me. But I figured I needed the head to push ABSENT to ABSENT-MINDED which wouldn't have bee a natural connection for me otherwise. It was like "ABSENT? Okay, I add something to absent but what? Oh 'use your head'. Absent-minded". I don't know if I would have gotten it as quickly with "body building".... but I would have gotten it eventually and... you are right; body building would have been a better title.

[JeffS]

Unsolved for me.

I noticed that there were 5 three-lettered words beginning with the letter T. With the 16A entry of TAC, I looked into a TIC-TAC-TOE theme. That led me to creating 5 mini tic-tac-toe games in the puzzle. I highlighted the three-letter T words, and tried to make something of the six remaining letters, but got nowhere. Initially I saw AMOEBA in the lower right game, which could lead to brainless, but there was an N where the A should be.

I saw the answer for 62A as JOE, substituted a T for the J to make Toe, looked to make a TIC somewhere, substituted the A in TAK with an i, looked to make TAC out of TAD, substituted C for D, .....? I finally gave up on that theme.

[Scott M]

Spent time looking for words related to head: Tete, Kopf, Noodle, Noggin, nothing. Hmm, Bean. There's BEA(G)LE, BE(R)N, BEA(U), (M)EANLY, I can take those replaced letters to spell GRUM, but there should be a P and a Y. Couldn't find anything better so I tossed in GRUMPY as a Hail Mary.

[Aragorn]

I stayed on the boat this week. It seemed apparent the themers were part of the solution, but I couldn't figure out what to do with them. That being said, it seems a bit of a stretch to append body part adjectives that aren't referenced by any of the clues or answers, and aren't necessarily related to the head, and that the answer requires appending "mind", which isn't a body part but is related to the head. Maybe I'm missing something that makes this fit together better.

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I managed to get there but only this morning! I had been looking at it on and off all weekend and had no insight, but also didn't feel like I had given it enough time and effort, so I resisted looking at the answer. I had a free morning today, and I was in the process of requesting a nudge, and when writing down everything I saw, I stumbled across it.

I actually backed into it, because I recognized the clues as being odd and wanted to use TOUCHY for "Unlikely to take criticism well", and I thought TACTFUL was better for "Not wanting to say what you really think". And because TACT can be a prefix (head?) for touch, I started thinking about the five senses. This got me to think about EAGLE-EYED as an alternate, and then seeing BEAGLE got me on the right path.

Weird distractions:
DENT is a good alternate answer for 53D (DING), and it ends IMPRUDENT. I wanted to find a use for FISH in UNSELFISH with "Big Tuna".
The central SAT ON included "Used" in its clue, a form of USE from the puzzle title. And two of the themers included the string SIT, a form of SAT.
"Use" is a homophone of U's, and we have an answer at 5D with three U's in it, and two other U's diagonally adjacent to each other.
Trent Reznor is well-known from Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated as NIN. And his entry at 36D sits right next to NIN(ON) at 35D.

[Relic]

My initial reaction to the puzzle solution was highly negative. Rather than react by assigning a low rating on fiend, I slept on it. This morning I gained a whole new respect on positivity for this mechanism.

Seems like 2024 may be a paradigm shift away from logical mechanisms toward more abstract mechanisms. The Friday Contest puzzle is the only meta puzzle I do, so to date I've had no exposure to the MGWCC or other meta puzzles, so this particular solution/path was a shock to the system for me. I'd rather learn from it than fight it, so I'll take this as a learning experience and move forward and hope to expand my toolbox of solving steps to include strategies for these more abstract mechanisms. Like many people, I'm not a fan of change, but I must either change my approach with these changing metas and learn how to solve or learn to be content with failing each week except for the occasional gift gimme puzzles.

As for this puzzle I followed the more traditional logical steps. I spent time in two rabbit holes:

First, having correctly idebntified the 6 theme answers I concluded the solution to be 6 letters. I played the alternative answer game linking the 6 theme adjectives to synonymous verbs (using your head could mean converting attitudes to actions); e.g. unselfish to share, watchful to tape, and prudent to upset. I thought this to be leading to "stupid" as the solution, but could do nothing with sensitive and could only link hesitant to stay, thus busting up my theory.

Second, I noticed each of the six theme adjectives had different adjectival suffixes; surely this is the path. Once again a promising start ended with a frustrated Hail Mary. The letters of the six suffixes ish, ful, ent, ive, ant, ial matched up with the letters in other 3-word entries with one letter different: -ish to 2D AHI missing the S, -ent to 4D end missing the T, -ive to 39A vir missing the e, -ant to 16A missiong the N, and -ial to 58D val missing the i. The only suffix I could not account for was -ful, which could have potentially given me the missing L needed for my solution. I ran the missing letters I found through the anagram solver and got "silent", my hail-mary submission.

[Damaged]

I seized on the "Your" in the title, and looked for clues with "You" or homophones thereof ("Young," "Eur"). Those corresponded to "THTAISE" in the grid, which I unscrambled to make ATHEIST.

Which seems presumptuous.

[Damaged]

My initial reaction to the puzzle solution was highly negative. Rather than react by assigning a low rating on fiend, I slept on it. This morning I gained a whole new respect on positivity for this mechanism.

Not me. Where's my pitchfork?

[Joe Ross]

[Fishoutowater]

Too hard!

[Cruciverbalisticexpi]

I feel like placing the related words directly across from the long clues really helped out. If they were randomly throughout the grid, I never would have been able to solve this. But KIND-A being right across from unselfish made it "somewhat" gettable. It was thin-skinned that really made it click for me.

[The XWord Rabbit]

Well, Muggles, what began as a promising week for your Rabbit, turned out to be a bit anticlimactic, to say the least.

Mr. Gaffney’s “Use Your Head” puzzle certainly offered up lots of blind alleys, but as is typical of the more challenging metas,
a combination of LITFTATT and duplicate methods prevailed.

Unsurprisingly, a RASH of honorable mentions: BarbaraK’s Post #232, Flying_Burrito’s Post #237, Dickie_Dunn’s Post #243 and an admirable first try by JeffS' Post #247 who joined our ranks two weeks ago.

But your Rabbit did find one worthy nominee, notable for its uniqueness, clarity and “close, but no cigar” ending. That would be the second of Relic’s tales of a Muggle lost:

“I noticed each of the six theme adjectives had different adjectival suffixes; surely this is the path. Once again a promising start ended with a frustrated Hail Mary. The letters of the six suffixes ish, ful, ent, ive, ant, ial matched up with the letters in other 3-word entries with one letter different: -ish to 2D AHI missing the S, -ent to 4D end missing the T, -ive to 39A vir missing the e, -ant to 16A missiong the N, and -ial to 58D val missing the i. The only suffix I could not account for was -ful, which could have potentially given me the missing L needed for my solution. I ran the missing letters I found through the anagram solver and got "silent", my Hail-Mary submission.”

Thanks to all for your extended efforts in trying to explain how to make sense of the methods to your madness. There was no question how your Rabbit intended to end this week’s post. It’s a tribute to the genius of college chemistry professors everywhere (Yes, you too, ajk.) Here’s Fred MacMurray discovering Flubber in “The Absent-minded Professor.” Until next week, then.

https://www.tcm.com/video/205757/absent ... e-flubber/

[SamKat9]

I struggled for a while with this one, but something reminded me of another WSJ puzzle with a "body-part idiom" theme, one of the first puzzles I needed help with. This made me think of "thin-skinned" with THINE next to SENSITIVE, and "eagle-eyed" with WATCHFUL next to BEAGLE, and the rest fell into place.

Sometimes my brain brains, sometimes it doesn't.

[DrTom]

A puzzle that was so obvious it was not obvious. I needed a nudge to get to see the path. I was soooo sure I had to remove the "head" of the words that had IM, UN, etc. and add one to those that did not. The deleted ones would form a new word with a new answer as would the newly created ones. A brilliant idea and mechanism, but a wrong one...alas.

I got to shore with help, but of course could not submit under those circumstances.

T

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is ABSENT-MINDED. Each theme answer has a compound-word synonym using a word one letter off from the other word on its row with a body part: UNSELFISH/KIND(A)-hearted; WATCHFUL/ (B)EAGLE-eyed; IMPRUDENT/(S)HAREbrained; SENSITIVE/THIN(E)-skinned; HESITANT/MEA(N)LY-mouthed; IMPARTIAL/ EVEN(T)-handed. The added letters spell ABSENT, suggesting the contest answer.

Another tricky one this week. We had 702 entries, somewhat fewer than usual. Just about 55% (387) were correct. Another 18% (124) submitted ABSENT which was very close, but missed the pattern of compound words and didn't quite work as an "adjective that does not describe most contest crossword solvers."

Other entries included CLUELESS (16), IMPATIENT (11), STUMPED (2) and DENSE (2), none of which describes any of you.

Congrats to this week's winner, Val Robison of Wilmington, NC!

[Flamel616]

Seeing the answer, I'm glad I didn't put more time into it than I did. The absolute killer for me would have been MEALY-mouthed. I may have heard that adjective once or twice in my life, but I didn't know what it meant until now. Combine that with the fact that it's the only one that leaves out a letter in the middle, and I'd have been absolutely stumped on that step.