"Letter Openers" May 17, 2024

[DrTom]

I will be very interested in the "inconsistency" that is mentioned and the other aggravations. It was not easy to be sure, and I had a ton of bad starts, but in the end it was all very consistent - at least to me. That said, I am often too naive to see the sophistication in a mechanism OR the faults in one (witness many of my own puzzles!).

[Miki]

It's 11 pm. And yes, I waited until the last possible minute, hoping someone is still awake to send me a hail mary.

Please help. I have part 1.


Thanks
Miki

No hints yet, but figured it out.
Submitted answer at 11:40 pm on Sunday night.

I will consider this much more of a victory than a page one submission.

[LadyBird]

I am ashore--thanks to an observation that my son and his wife made--and a subtle hint from Dr. Tom. How the heck did some folks solve so quickly!

[Ann]

On the shore!

[cheekumbaldy]

Got it just under the wire! Wow, my closest one ever!

[hcbirker]

[woozy]

Oops. Forgot to submit.....

[hcbirker]

[benchen71]

Oops. Forgot to submit.....

Me too!

[otlaolap]

And the great reveal is in. My worry was pointless. After submitting, I had wondered whether we would be seeing another of those "and finally apply the steps that got you to this answer to this answer" answers: whether RRATED, just like XAXIS and TSHIRT and the others, should become an index using the letters ATED to find something else. But no clues started with a word containing just those letters, and in any case there was no way to get more such words out of the XAXIS et al clues, so I thought it likely that the answer remained at RRATED. And it does. And the absence of email on Monday will not lead to any RRATED excoriations, just impatient anticipation of Thursday.

[CopperRiver]

Had step one but never would have got step two. Congrats to those that solved.

[escapeartist]

When I tried what was ultimately the solution and got RR for the first two letters, I was about to give up and search for something else - but fortunately I thought “let’s just see what this might anagram into” - but it just spelled it out and my jaw dropped

[Kas]

In a word: No.

Also, “never.”
Possibly even, “pft.”

(Staying with the theme, it would also be appropriate to note that those were just the "g-rated" options. I’ll forgo the others out of politeness…)

Tip of the hat to the solvers on this one!

[PQ63]

My only complaint is there were more than 6 answers that contained a letter followed by a word (e.g. AWIRE).

[Aragorn]

My only complaint is there were more than 6 answers that contained a letter followed by a word (e.g. AWIRE).

You can ignore those because “a” when used in “a wire” is a word.

[mikeB]

Fabulous meta. The solving starts while we’re working the grid. We had read the title but tucked it away until it could mean something. Meanwhile, a pattern develops, as we notice the occurrence of entries that are compound words, where each one’s first word is actually a single letter. That aligns neatly with the title. (We may think we’re finished with the title, but the title isn’t finished with us until later.) We might opine that it’s early, yet we’re so close to solving. Uh-huh. That’s when things slow down a little. What do we do with these six entries and their “openers”? We revisit the prompt, which we had also tucked away, and it now helps to narrow our focus. How? The answer has six letters, and we have identified six entries with single-letter openers. That congruence eliminates a lot of distractions that might otherwise attract rabbits. One example: a few words (YOUIN, DEIST and ASIA) begin phonetically with letter names that coincide with the “openers” U, D and A. We may briefly fiddle with that, but three out of six won’t close the deal, so we put that aside. Our task is to harvest one letter from each of the six theme entries, but how? While we’re contemplating that, we notice that each of those entries repeats its opening letter. With no exceptions, it’s tempting to try to implicate that feature in the solve. The problem is that the space between the letter pairs varies from zero to four, making it very unlikely that a uniform manipulation rule can be applied to all six. But wait: one thing we can do is erase the duplicate letters and see what can be done with the remainders. Unfortunately, no worthwhile connections pop out of the grid. With things grinding to a halt, there are two questions worth (belatedly) considering: Have we gleaned all available insight from the title? And have we examined the clues themselves – a vast reservoir of words, letters and meanings that often yield pay dirt? Addressing these questions simultaneously leads to looking at the “openers” among the clues and trying to match them with the six entries minus their erased letters. Then Whoosh! This meta really underscores the genius that goes into these puzzles. Let’s see: Formulate theme entries with letters that can be erased using a consistent rule; come up with six companion clues whose entries reveal the solution, and whose opening words consist of the remaining letters of each theme entry; oh, and those 12 key entries need to intersect properly with dozens of other grid entries; for elegance, make sure that those six companion entries are ordered in the grid so as to reveal the puzzle’s answer without anagramming; and for icing on the cake, have the puzzle’s answer mimic the theme entries – that is, begin with a stand-alone letter that is duplicated in the word. Wow. The genius in a meta like this can be very easy to underestimate. Hats off to Mr. Gaffney for creating such a masterpiece.

[Bird Lives]

The six critical letters are D, U, X, C, A, T
How might they be related to other entries in the grid?

Let’s start with X.
How many gases are there? Dozens? Hundreds? More? But only one begins with X. The clue for GAS begins “Xenon or . . .” Surely this is not a coincidence. After all, Matt insists that he does not deliberately put red herrings into his puzzles.

What about D?
How many NHL teams are there? Thirty-two (I looked it up). Only one begins with the letter D. The clue for NHLTEAM begins “Ducks . . .” Surely this is not a coincidence. And, as we know, it cannot be a red herring.

What about the other capitalized words in the clues? U for exaample.
John Stamos has played many roles. IMDB counts 80! Yet of all those, the one in the clue for STAMOS gives only Uncle Jesse. Surely this is not a coincidence. Or a red herring.

And the letter C?
Sia, the famous AUSTRALIAN singer-songwriter (OK, I’d never heard of her, but I don’t get out much) has had many hits, but the one in the clue begins with, you guessed it, C (“Chandelier”). Coincidence? Herring? Surely not.

And then there’s T.
There are 213 DEMOCRATIC representatives in the House. The one in the clue for that entry is Shri Thenadar. He is little known outside his district, but his name does begin with with letter T. Not a coincidence and nothing fishy, right?

Unfortunately, the letters from these derived entries (GAS, NHLTEAMS, STAMOS,, etc.) spelled nothing recognizable as a word in the English language, and I was forced to try a less interesting method, one that involved not matching the critical letters to words in the clues but subtracting them.

[Flying_Burrito]

I got into the "Q - U links" tar pit and unfortunately never pulled myself out of it. Congrats to Page 1 solvers, this was a Kas 5 for me.

[Joepickett]

I was trying two letter beginnings of a letter (correspondence) or email.
Such as RE (occurs twice), CC, ATTY caught my eye as I was thinking ATTN.
I was finally steered in the right direction after taking that detour.

[Mister Squawk]

So did anyone submit TARRED? Overly reliant on my anagram finder, in a rush to beat the page one deadline, that perfectly valid 6-letter adjective popped up (because what English word starts with 'RR'?)

Fortunately, the desire to be correct won out over the desire to be quick.