XWord Muggles Forum

What article was that? Tried googling and nothing. Thank you!

mflaminio wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 8:17 am

Wendy Walker wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2019 5:32 pm Solving this one reminded me of my most memorable WSJ puzzle experience. And no, not that vile Three Musketeers one (still smarting), which some of you old-timers will recall! This week's meta is a 100 percenter.
Oh, and yes, I loved that Epstein piece last week on "vogue" words!

What article was that. Tried googling it and nothing. Thank you.

"How to Weaponize an Existential Threat"
Apr. 29, p.13
As I commented on Wendy's original post, there are plenty of words that we use ("we" including Epstein) and think are just fine that the Epsteins of some early period would have dismissed as "vogue" words or as just plain incorrect.

Bob cruise director wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 7:09 am Wendy or one of our other editors - have you ever seen the word Eddying before?

Nope, never! It is certainly a word, just a rare one.

BethA wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 12:10 am I felt like some other puzzles - I was onto the tip of the iceberg. I saw so many W’s, but took overnight to realize that those were just a part of the NESW configuration! It was distracting!

Beth, all the W's were the "tell" for me. Thank goodness!

Aargh. KAS 4 for me. I saw all the Ws, and I even tried to find directional words but never saw what in hindsight should have hit me in the face. I did see "ORBITS" in an L shape in the SE corner, but naturally that only led me in circles. I also got distracted looking for a Left/Right rabbit (LAW DEGREE/RAW NERVES).

Wonderful puzzle, kudos to all who solved and good luck winning that mug!

I started out by looking at the letters above the Ns, below the Ss, etc. Same strategy I had tried incorrectly in a PGWCC last month. Then I had the great idea to color in every N, S, E, and W to see if they revealed something. That was a lovely mess. Fortunately I thought of the correct strategy after I put it away for a while, before I did more damage to my puzzle and brain.

At first I was totally dead in the water and had no clue where to go. For some reason, all of a sudden the N,S,E,W pattern jumped out at me. It took a little longer because I missed one of the patterns so I was a letter short. Then I had to look up to find that "eddying" is really a word.

Amazing construction.

And I wish I could figure out why some weeks the answer comes quickly and others it never comes.

I started off in a completely obscure rabbit hole looking for synonyms for "going" that wound around. Found wend, wind, gone, and a couple that I no longer recall. Then my brilliant son suggested that if one heads east then west one ends up back in the same place so I saw the multiple instances of E [?] W. Once I noticed that each of those was also lined up with N above and S below to complete the compass rose, I realized I had it!

**If someone can explain which comments seemed like spoilers, I'd be grateful because I sure didn't notice any while I puzzled through this one.
Thanks!

Janet P wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 9:51 am**If someone can explain which comments seemed like spoilers, I'd be grateful because I sure didn't notice any while I puzzled through this one.

No spoilers. I thought that all of the comments about how unusual the answer word is and needing to look it up in a dictionary were a pretty big hint. It eliminates a lot and pretty much tells you that the answer is "orthographic instead of referential" to use Laura's phrase from Crossword Fiend last week. But most people didn't seem bothered by it or even notice. I never really paid attention to this issue at the WSJ Blog, so I just wasn't sure where the line is. Going forward, I will remove obvious spoilers and rely on the group to let me know by PM or reporting a post if they think anything else is over the line.

Must have been hallucinating since I saw many rabbit holes:

1. Blocks of EAST - others saw that same mirage.
2. 62A AWGEE - could that refer to HAW and GEE?
3. 67A SLAY = going - led me to look for DOA in the grid, including diagonals.

Finally saw the pattern. Noticed the day after that every W in the grid was a compass point. Hope my prior post wasn't a spoiler - was just trying to be humorous. Didn't realize some solvers would key on the Ws.

BTW, I should know by now that all metas are elegantly constructed so I shouldn't waste time on blurry patterns. Silly wabbit.

I think my cryptic crosswords helped me with this one. Being tired, I picked up the puzzle and read the title literally, as I would do with a cryptic. That led me quickly to the right approach, looking for something that was inside all the directions (NSEW).

Wendy Walker wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2019 10:14 am

jenirvin wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2019 9:58 am On the boat. Hit me with a cocktail or three, Isaac. I may be here a while, as I'll be unavailable much of the weekend - my mom is having gallbladder surgery. She's a tough 87, so I'm hoping she'll do fine. Best of luck to all muggles!!

Hope your Mom does OK! Look at it this way: they wouldn't be operating if she weren't in good shape to start with.

Thank you, Wendy! A positive spin always helps. So far so good, but not home yet.

BrianMac wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 10:23 am

Janet P wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 9:51 am**If someone can explain which comments seemed like spoilers, I'd be grateful because I sure didn't notice any while I puzzled through this one.

No spoilers. I thought that all of the comments about how unusual the answer word is and needing to look it up in a dictionary were a pretty big hint. It eliminates a lot and pretty much tells you that the answer is "orthographic instead of referential" to use Laura's phrase from Crossword Fiend last week. But most people didn't seem bothered by it or even notice. I never really paid attention to this issue at the WSJ Blog, so I just wasn't sure where the line is. Going forward, I will remove obvious spoilers and rely on the group to let me know by PM or reporting a post if they think anything else is over the line.

The funny thing is that I thought it could give me a hint, but in the end, it didn't. I guess I'm an outlier in that I didn't think the word eddying was unusual.

From the start I knew there had to be significance to the letters N,S,E, and W so I made a couple of copies of the completed grid so I could highlight these directional letters. I then thought a pattern or outline of something would emerge but all I got was a big mess. I put it down, took a cat nap, and took a second look and, sure enough, distinct groupings of N,S,E, and W were there; this led to the obvious solution -- EDDYING -- but I looked it up before submitting just to make sure it was a real word.

Wendy Walker wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 9:27 am

BethA wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 12:10 am I felt like some other puzzles - I was onto the tip of the iceberg. I saw so many W’s, but took overnight to realize that those were just a part of the NESW configuration! It was distracting!

Beth, all the W's were the "tell" for me. Thank goodness!

You may have an advantage in noticing W’s, Wwwwendy Wwwwalker!!

Busy weekend with lots of kids baseball games, but I did find my way ashore. (Just to make sure you are counting me, Bob!)

jenirvin wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 10:42 am I think my cryptic crosswords helped me with this one. Being tired, I picked up the puzzle and read the title literally, as I would do with a cryptic. That led me quickly to the right approach, looking for something that was inside all the directions (NSEW).

I had the same reaction! Solving cryptics can really help. I immediately thought, "What picture will I get if I color all the squares containing an N, E, W or S?" Matt had a puzzle once where by shading every N, I, K and E, a swoosh appeared in the grid. Wrong rabbit hole, but it helped me see the right one. Lucky.

Congratulations to everyone who cracked this ingenious puzzle (and to Mike who performed an amazing feat of construction). We had an impressive 1073 entries and fully 90% were correct. Incorrect answers were quite a grab bag, including SWEEP, RESOLUTION, SWIPE, SWIPE RIGHT, PERPETUAL, TREMORS, and many others.

And congrats to this week's winner: Kathleen Reilly Graves of Briarcliff Manor, NY.

FrankieHeck wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 9:34 am I started out by looking at the letters above the Ns, below the Ss, etc. Same strategy I had tried incorrectly in a PGWCC last month. Then I had the great idea to color in every N, S, E, and W to see if they revealed something. That was a lovely mess. Fortunately I thought of the correct strategy after I put it away for a while, before I did more damage to my puzzle and brain.

In my seemingly never-ending quest to ignore Occam's Razor, I started traversing squares in every direction -- not just N,S, E and W, but U, D, R and L -- to see where that would lead me... until I told myself "Not even my ex-wives would be that mean!"

Well, I almost went in the right direction, at one point highlighting every occurrence of N, S, E, or W, and noticing some letters were surrounded, but of course there was an E inside the first NSEW rose, so I highlighted in, and was confounded by a word starting with DD and tried other paths, like...

My most amusing wrong pass The clearly INtentional INclusion of all the INstances of "IN" in the puzzle, as one can clearly INtuit from the "Going IN all directions" clearly INdicates. (There are INs going Depending on which of the all directions you follow, you can even find a series of letters that anagrams to "SAT WONKY", which could be a direction... ha!