Listen Up!

[bhamren]

I am almost always a paper and pen solver. Being at a job site with no access to a printer for 2 days I tried the Excel version. It works quite nice, so thanks! I was able to use one of the lower versions to color code. I started down one wrong rabbit hole but then saw the mechanism so I got out of the office chair, confirmed. Nice puzzle.

[cbarbee002]

Additional solvers:

KayW
Beth Tyrpin
bhamren
Dow Jones
Thurman8er
ky-mike
MarkWoychick

For those still on the sofa:

You are looking for words that pair up in some fashion

Look for seven pairs of words

And a dead giveaway:

You are looking for seven pairs of words. Listen!

[MarkWoychick]

Off the couch, finally. It took me a while, but on the plus side, I did find $1.23 in change under the couch cushions! Very fun and entertaining puzzle - thanks @cbarbee002!

[HeadinHome]

Gahhhh… those hints aren’t helping at all. I’ve had all those from day one and still can’t figure out what to do with them. If someone wants to give me a shove that will be just fine. I must be missing the section of brain required for the final step.

UPDATE - thanks to Whimsy I have it now. I had done that very mechanism a good while back, but at that point I was still missing one of the required pieces ... the one I didn't have was because I pronounce one of the words differently so I didn't consider that pair to be homophones . I had since added that piece, but hadn't gone back to apply the mechanism again to the new collection. When I did, the rest (as my calculus teacher used to say) was algebra.

[hoover]

UPDATE - thanks to Whimsy I have it now. I had done that very mechanism a good while back, but at that point I was still missing one of the required pieces ... the one I didn't have was because I pronounce one of the words differently so I didn't consider that pair to be homophones .

I seem to recall that there was a discussion about that one recently, and possibly it was in a puzzle where it was equated to the letter R. The discussion was the pronunciation ARRRR vs. OWRRR, which stuck in my head because I know someone who pronounces it a third way to sound the same as OAR and OR.

[hoover]

the rest (as my calculus teacher used to say) was algebra.

But isn't calculus just algebra applied to infinitesimals?

[madhatter5]

But isn't calculus just analysis applied to real-valued differentiable and integrable function spaces?

[HeadinHome]

But isn't calculus just analysis applied to real-valued differentiable and integrable function spaces?

Stop that.

[HeadinHome]

UPDATE - thanks to Whimsy I have it now. I had done that very mechanism a good while back, but at that point I was still missing one of the required pieces ... the one I didn't have was because I pronounce one of the words differently so I didn't consider that pair to be homophones .

I seem to recall that there was a discussion about that one recently, and possibly it was in a puzzle where it was equated to the letter R. The discussion was the pronunciation ARRRR vs. OWRRR, which stuck in my head because I know someone who pronounces it a third way to sound the same as OAR and OR.

yes.. that was me in the zoom group who raised that objection too! I must have issues.

[CPJohnson]

Pretty sure I got it; I needed a push from Cinny and all of Chris's hints. Thanks, Chris!

[michaelm]

Off the couch after being in a daze for, well...
Thanks to HeadinHome for the final pull out of the sunken cushions.
And thanks to Chris for the fantastic MMM!

[cbarbee002]

Well, happy to have had a "relatively" easy meta, what with the WSJ and MGWCC this week (neither of which I have started . . . ). The meta played on homophones, which the title "Listen Up" intended to convey. The "Up" portion of the title was meant to have you looking up (and down, i.e. vertically vs horizontally) for the mechanism, as all of the seven homophones of "across" grid entries were "down" entries. I'm sure some of you were looking for words from bottom to top of the grid - - minor diversion.

Anyway, here's the official solution:

I'll - - -> AISLE = A
LONE - -> LOAN = L
LEAK - -> LEEK = L
HOUR - -> OUR = O
ONE - -> WON = W
ATE - -> EIGHT = E
DOE - -> DOUGH = D

Each of the "down" entries are in order in the grid, so that once you found them, there was no need to do any anagramming. In keeping with the meta theme, the homophone of ALLOWED is ALOUD, the meta answer.

When looking just at the grid, vs at the clues to know how to pronounce the grid words, some of you were caught up with ILL being "sick" (short "I"), vs. the contraction of "I WILL (long "I"). Additionally, the "5-letter word" prompt was a stumbling block, since there were seven homophone pairs. In looking for just a 5-letter answer, several of you stopped when you found 5 word pairs, but nonetheless came up with some clever answers!

Thanks to all of you who solved (or attempted)!

[JeanneC]

Elegant!

[sharkicicles]

Ah, I was only able to find 6 of the 7, as I think of “I’ll” as more like OWL than AISLE.

But I enjoyed the puzzle nevertheless. Thank you!