Welcome to Phil's Crossword Corner (PCC)! Philip Chow (aka Phil) is an auditor at NYC Dept of Parks and Recreation who makes crossword puzzles for fun in his free time. A new meta puzzle posts every other Saturday weekend on Crosshare.
Phil’s metas will usually include immediate nudges, a great tool for new solvers. You can reach him at pchow13@gmail.com
Finally getting around to posting my old puzzles here on this forum.
Please see below for PCC#12 - "That's Preposterous" originally posted on Crosshare 10/13/23
[Level 1] Meta prompt: The answer to the meta is a word
Note: the level is the intended difficulty I had in mind when I designed the puzzle, but may play differently since every solver has their own area of expertise... what one person may find easy, another may find difficult.
Have fun and keep in mind if you're ever lost at sea, google is your best friend (actually, I don't know if you'd get internet service in the middle of the ocean)
-Phil
Hint #1: From 20A, 28A, 45A, 54A - the meta answer is a 13-letter word, has 3 syllables, 4 unique letters, and the only vowel is E... from 70A, the four letters in the word are L, E, N, and S
Hint #2: The answer relates to the title... the meta answer means "the state of being preposterous"
Hint #3: [smell or taste, for example] + [opposite of more] + [Loch ___ monster]
Solution below - SPOILER ALERT:
Answer explanation: pretty self-explanatory... from the meta clues, we needed to find a 13-letter word which has 3 syllables, 4 unique letters, and has E as its only vowel... the clue for LENS also lets us know that the four letters in the word are L, E, N, and S... the toughest part is guessing a random word that fits this criteria... you can use this pretty nifty online tool (https://www.litscape.com/word_tools/words_made_from.php) to come up with SENSELESSNESS
