"Body Language " October 6, 2023

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is NOSE. Change one letter in each theme entry to form a slang term for a body part: CHOPPERS, PIEHOLE, PEEPERS, TICKER and NOODLE. Then find an answer one letter off from the real names of those parts: teeth/SEETH, mouth/MONTH, eyes/OYES, heart/HUART, brain/TRAIN. Those changed letters spell SNOUT, a slang term for the contest answer.

Another tricky one with a twisty trail to the solution: We had 757 entries, about 70% correct. The prompt yielded a wide range of incorrect four-letter body parts including HEAD (42), PORE (18), EYES (15), HAND (12), SKIN (10), and a bunch of others.

Congrats to this week's winner: Paul H. Edelman of Nashville, Tenn.!

[Inca]

OK, I really don't do well under pressure. And, apparently I feel pressured when I need to solve the meta by Sunday night and I don't see the path right away. Again, I only had time to look at this puzzle a short time on Thursday evening and then couldn't get back to it until today. I saw the path immediately tonight and then it took a few minutes to see which letters to pick up and in what order...and voila. This is not the first time this has happened to me. This was a very clever and involved meta....for me.

[higgysue]

I have an answer that I'm almost positive is NOT the desired answer. But I can show the steps. Will try again...

Follow up:
I did submit the correct answer, but did not follow the mechanic.

SEETH and HUART jumped out at me immediately after solving the grid. I noticed those (especially HUART) were one letter off from body parts. I figured that was a bit easy, so looked at the long answers, but didn't see anything jumping out, plus there were five long answers but the hint said four letters. I found two more body parts with one letter off (MONTH and OYES), and stopped there.

Looking at the replaced letters gave me SNOU, and I assumed I would then perform one more single letter replacement to solve...

ANUS ?!?

This made me laugh! The first mechanism I tried was to combine two entries together. 20A & 68A: POOHOLE? Really? But I couldn’t find any others so I gave up on that. Haha!