![🙋♀️](//cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/twitter/twemoji@latest/assets/svg/1f64b-200d-2640-fe0f.svg)
My hand is raised to request advancing to the head of the still long line awaiting a good ship’s flogging for not tuning in on this won.
I regularly dip into Steven Pinker’s devilishly entertaining tome*, “Words and Rules”, on how our many irregular verbs have evolved. So I could see we had been dealed/dealt those in the theme answers, and should probably look for more such verbs for the meta answer. Somehow I lost focus on this, even when searching for the invisible win/won for prevail.
Best of many red herrings led/leaded to 24a telling us to add a “y” to a word.
Yabba? Huey? Wally?
Now, in the title, is won spelled/spelt backwards. Wally, aka Waldo, and his evil twin spelled backwards Odlaw might have given Mike a chuckle, had I not drifted off before hailing.
I’m one of the more ancient mariners aboard and had never heard of them. But all that googling down cartoon memory lane was actually fun for me.
p.s. Fun fact from *:George Washington still catched a cold long after the rest of the country had already moved ahead and caught theirs.