"Sign Language" June 14, 2024

[Deb F]

Pencil and paper, Looking at the Muggles who use pen, no wonder they solve every single week and I'm lucky to get 25%!!! So, is it me or the pencil? Hmmm.

[BarbaraK]

It's a bit bizarre which things stick in my mind from almost 9 years of WSJ crossword contests.

My first observation about this week's puzzle was that a Gaffney/Gordon collaboration is unusual. This was only the 4th. And it had to mean there was something super tricky about the puzzle that required two super constructors to get it to work.

And I remembered their first WSJ collaboration (from February 17th, 2017). The answer was "Gluten free" and the grid did not contain any Gs, Ls, Us, Ts, Es, or Ns! In the writeup on Crossword Fiend, reviewer Evad said

I wonder how hard it is to find foods without these 6 letters, but even more difficult is to find fill entries that eschew them as well. (My working theory is that’s why Matt reached out to Peter, known for his incredibly long word list

and Matt posted in the comments

Thanks, Evad. You’re exactly right on how the collaboration happened. The full timeline is:

*A couple of years ago I had an idea to do a “reverse letter bank” meta, where certain letters are excluded from the grid and spell something out.
*Before I got around to implementing the idea, Peter beat me to it with this Fireball meta: http://crosswordfiend.com/2015/02/01/mo ... 2-2015/#fb
(It wouldn’t surprise me if there are precursors to this one, but I’m not aware of any)
*Crestfallen at getting beaten to it, I never wrote my reverse letter-bank.
*A couple of years passed and I wondered if a GLUTEN-free grid was possible, with gluten- and GLUTEN-free foods as the theme entries.
*The theme entries worked, but after about an hour I realized the grid was beyond human capacity and called in the cavalry (Peter and his database). That did the trick, and then we split the clues and haggled over a few crossings in the grid.

So for those who wonder why I ever even thought of pulling up Mechapuzzle and looking at the letter frequencies and positions, while that is something I eventually try any time I'm totally stuck on a meta, I suspect I got to it quicker than I otherwise might have because I remembered this old puzzle. Don't remember last week's, but still remember this one from 8 years ago. Bizarre.

[HoldThatThought]

Now you really have me feeling bad about not remembering what I had for lunch 3 hours ago. Darn you, memory people!