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Resident of a hidden mushroom village / THU 8-28-25 / Fair Deal prez / Follower of Joel / Bit of camp entertainment / Mythological beast able to regenerate its heads / Battle carriers / Hebrew name for God / ___ D'Arcy, co-star of HBO's "House of the Dragon" / "Table" for one's TV dinner, perhaps / Like Frodo at the end of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy / One of three in the Domino's logo
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Constructor: Joel Woodford
Relative difficulty: Easy, maybe Easy-Medium
Theme answers:
- GOOD ENOUGH (17A: Recently dates) (i.e. "Decently rated)
- FREAK OUT (25A: No guts) (i.e. "Go nuts")
- CHAINLINK FENCES (41A: Battle carriers) (i.e. "Cattle barriers")
- FELL FLAT (52A: Packed lunch) (i.e. "Lacked punch")
William Archibald Spooner (22 July 1844 – 29 August 1930) was a British clergyman and long-serving Oxford don. He was most notable for his absent-mindedness, and for supposedly mixing up the syllables in a spoken phrase, with unintentionally comic effect. Such phrases became known as spoonerisms, and are often used humorously. Many spoonerisms have been invented and attributed to Spooner. [...] Spooner became famous for his manner of speaking, real or alleged "spoonerisms", plays on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched. Few, if any, of his own spoonerisms were deliberate, and many of those attributed to him are apocryphal; in 1928, The New York Times described them as a "myth principally invented by" one of his former students, Robert Seton, who subsequently collaborated with Arthur Sharp on the first book of spoonerisms.// Spooner is said to have disliked the reputation gained for getting his words muddled. Maurice Bowra, who had been another of his students, commented that Spooner "was sensitive to any reference to the subject." He described being part of a group that gathered outside Spooner's window one evening, calling for a speech; Spooner replied "You don't want a speech. You only want me to say one of those things," and refused to comment further. // The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (3rd edition, 1979) lists only one substantiated spoonerism: "The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer." (rate of wages) In a 1928 interview, Spooner himself admitted to uttering "Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take" (Conquering Kings). Spooner called this hymn out from the pulpit in 1879.
• • •
I didn't see that the clues were Spoonerisms until I got to the revealer. I could see the clues didn't seem to match the answers, and I *knew* that if I just skipped to the bottom of the grid and worked out the revealer, things would go somewhat faster, but I decided to be stubborn and just work my way from top to bottom without any "reveal." So my experience was "fairly boring themeless with four long mystery answers." Shrug. When I got to the end and didn't get the "Congratulations" message. I figured I'd filled my final square incorrectly—the "A" in EMMA / STA (64D: ___ D'Arcy, co-star of HBO's "House of the Dragon" / 73A: "Come ___?" (Italian for "How are you?")). Don't watch dragon shows, don't know that actress, and don't know much Italian, so though "A" seemed right, I was willing to entertain other vowels once "A" seemed to fail. Eventually I just left "A" in place and went over the puzzle answer by answer: all the Acrosses and then into the Downs before I finally saw YCHWEH. Bah. But there's no actual difficulty to this puzzle that I can see, beyond the theme answers themselves. The clue on SKIT threw me, for sure (36D: Bit of camp entertainment). I only just realized the clue is probably referring to summer camp? My first thought was "are SKITs campy? what is 'camp' about a SKIT." But I guess maybe campers put on SKITs? For fun? I'm over 40 years removed from my last experience of summer camp, so any memories I have of such a thing are hazy at best, false at worst.
Clue round-up:
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- 1A: "Table" for one's TV dinner, perhaps (LAP) — do people still eat TV dinners? Like, Swanson's or whatever? These feel like a mid-late 20c phenomenon (i.e. a phenomenon associated with the rise of television). I don't think I've had a proper "TV dinner" since the mid-'80s maybe. My parents never served them, but they were like a fun novelty treat when we were on our own for dinner sometimes. Rarely, but sometimes. Mostly we just harassed them until they let us get Burger King.
- 15A: ___ Highway (Maui tourist attraction) (HANA) — didn't know it, but also never saw the clue. The answer just sorta filled itself in, and then later I noticed HANA and thought "oh, the tennis player?" Then I read the clue—nope, different HANA.
- 32A: Like Frodo at the end of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy (ASEA) — I watched all those LOTR movies and don't remember a thing about them, so boring were they to me. I tried reading the LOTR and couldn't even make it through the first book. I did enjoy The Hobbit as a standalone book. But the LOTR was just never my thing. Anyway, you say he was ASEA at the end, and I believe you.
- 44A: Mythological beast able to regenerate its heads (HYDRA) — it's weird, demographically, that I didn't like LOTR because I was the right age and the right amount of dorkiness. I even played D&D as a tween, which seems very LOTR-adjacent. Had all the different-sided dice (which I ended up repurposing for my homemade version of Strat-O-Matic baseball...), collected the little lead figures, and read the Monster Manual, which is how I learned about ... the HYDRA (as well as something called a Gelatinous Cube, but that's a monster for another day).
 |
| [the original Monster Manual was just fun, the illustrations charming and pleasingly non-digital] |
- 47A: One of three in the Domino's logo (PIP) — feels like it's been a pippy month. Pips on dice, and now pips on dominoes. I haven't eaten Domino's since early grad school, maybe?? (i.e. the '90s). They were big anti-abortion funders (well, the founder, Tom Monaghan was), so we did not f*** with them. Monaghan was an Ann Arbor native, so his politics were maybe better known in Ann Arbor (where I was in grad school) than other places. Anyway, I have great pizza in my neighborhood now, so I'm never desperate enough to order mediocre delivery. If you've got no other options, I guess I get it.
- 60A: Follower of Joel (AMOS) — in the Bible
- 7D: Resident of a hidden mushroom village (SMURF) — Can SMURFs and MARIO & LUIGI coexist in the same grid? I feel like they'd be natural enemies. Where's that crossover? I don't care about Marvel's Infinity War or Secret Wars (coming 2027), but I would absolutely check out a SMURF/MARIO WARS. Way more entertainment potential than yet another Star Wars installment, for instance.
That's all. See you next time.
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58 comments:
Does anyone remember the spoonerism puzzle from several years ago that dealt with Beatles songs? She’s Leaving Home became She’s Heaving Loam, and She Loves You became Lee Shoves You? It felt a little more creative.
Finished it without cheating, but also without using the theme. I knew a Spoonerism was a reversal of sounds, but I foolishly ignored the revealer and tried to apply them to the answers instead of to the clues. Liked it better than most Thursdays.
Easy to Super-Easy. As often happens, not reading the theme clues helped. As OFL said, I solved it as a themeless. My only overwrite was TypE a for the 8D go-getter. I was sufficiently sure that it inspired me to remove the correct ANEMIA at 14A. But that was corrected quickly. No WOEs.
My first encounter with the word YAHWEH (9D) was in a religion class when I was a freshman in high school. The teacher wrote it on the board as YEWHEW. He corrected himself the next day, but the damage had been done. We students imagined a new "religion" that worshipped the god YEWHEW (pronounced Yoo-Hoo).
Rex summed it up pretty well. I knew something fishy was going on with the theme entries, decided to hang around for the reveal, tried reversing things for a bit and got nowhere - came here for Rex to explain it to me. Boring (this whole week has been one big snoozefest).
Please find the date for that one, as I’d love to see it!!
Yes, suspicious that it's been such a Pippy month just when the NYT launches a new game called Pips 🙄
I wonder if all the PIPs have to do with the new NYT game Pips
Not definitively saying this is the reason the puzzle has been pippy this month, but the NYT games app has a new game called “Pips”. Seems too coincidental to not be some cross branding.
Super-easy, even though I had no idea about the theme until I got the revealer. At that point I had only nine squares left, all in the S and SE. I definitely had Nancy's dictum in mind - that the trick would be in the clues - but that did not help while solving.
You would think, with two M&A Spoonerism puzzles in the last week, that may brain would have been primed to spot them today but no.
Glad EMMA/STA was correct; it could have been EMMe/STe for all I knew. Also glad I had LUIGI in place before getting to the LIS/LyS KeaLoa.
I was surprised to see YAHWEH. My understanding is that some religious Jews cannot write or erase the name of God, and it seems a little insensitive to include it in a puzzle.
"Where's the crossover?" Wellllll... https://www.myabandonware.com/game/blip-blop-balls-of-steel-klb is a pretty weird and gory shooter game featuring, among other things, evil SMURFs and caricatures of MARIO and LUIGI.
I also solved as a themeless with a mystery gimmick until the end. The SPOONERISMs are not only random but pretty dull, they only swap initial consonants in each pair of words.
I’m familiar with barbed wire fences as cattle barriers, but don’t remember any chain link fences on the farms I grew up around. Not hard to infer, just messy.
Hey All !
Never thought to SPOONERIze the clues. Was trying to do it with the answers, and got nowhere. Again, the Rexplanation to the rescue!
The NYT getting all wacky and switching the Weds and ThursPuzs. Keeps you on your toes.
Fill good, F's aplenty. KELP crossing KALE. Aren't they the same thing? Har.
How didn't LOLL become an initialism for Laughing Out Loud Louder?
What was with the crazy clue on BACH? That is not an Abbr. for a bachelor or bachelorette party. Just clue it as Johann. Stop trying to reinvest the wheel.
That's about it. Have a great Thursday!
Six F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
This was a slog. Had TypEa instead of TIGER at 8D, and it went south from there. Like I was a little too early with ibm instead of AOL (29A). Also, was not familiar with Spooner or his isms. Yuck.
I actually used the revealer. I reached it by travelling through the grid heater skelter and once I had it, I could fill in three of the theme answers right away and the puzzle became very easy. It was my fastest Thursday ever.
Wow. Quite in contrast to Rex, I LOVED the revealer in a way I rarely love a revealer. I was almost completely done with the puzzle, even with the mismatched clues and theme answers, but was totally perplexed. Then I hit the revealer… the answers obviously weren’t spoonerisms, but… a-ha!, it’s the clues! Gave me a big unexpected smile. I rarely, as in pretty much never, like it when the revealer tells me something afterwards that would have helped me solve, but this was an exception for some reason. It all made sense! Really enjoyed it!
The road to Hana is definitely something to be experienced, even though it made me seasick. I guess you get used to it, but yikes. If you do a full circle and come back the back way, it’s even more insane.
We’ve seen spoonerisms in puzzles before, but I don’t remember them ever showing up in the clues, and if this is a first, then it’s a debut theme device on top of a debut puzzle for this 20-year-old constructor – a fubble dirst, and props for that, Joel.
It was a guy-one-bet-one-free puzzle for me – poo tuzzles in one. My first pass yielded swaths of white, many clues opaque. Then my eyes fell on the revealer’s “Feature of the clues….”, and when I looked at the theme clues laterally, the curtains opened wide, begetting splat upon splat to the end.
What a sweet feeling, when criddles rack.
So, as with a collerroaster ride, with that slow grind up then a “Whee!” downhill, both my brain’s workout ethic and love of play were fully satisfied.
Boy, was I dismirected by [Shade in a picturesque island scene], where I stuck with “palm” instead of AQUA for way too long. I did like the neighboring palindromes PIP and TUT.
Congratulations on your debut, Joel, and thank you for a most jended splourney!
In the opening moments, when I was having deep trouble cracking the NW corner, there was a fleeting moment when I wondered if this puzzle would deal me a blushing crow.
This Pips game has not shown up in my NYT games app - maybe one has to do some upgrade? And is it any good? I’m not a big fan of their other new-ish game, Strands.
Thought this was a lot more fun than Rex, to say the least. Probably because I’ve had a lot less experience with Spoonerism puzzles, but also I don’t fully understand his concerns with randomness or arbitrariness. Some themes are tighter than others but to me they all seem random and arbitrary. Anyway, to this untrained eye, “no guts” was pretty funny. Got seriously stuck at the end when I entered mOlar for TOOTH and hug on to that for way too long.
I solved this as a themeless too, and didn’t even understand it when done because I couldn’t remember what a SPOONERISM was. So rather then look it up I just read the write-up. Kind of a dull puzzle, I like a snappy Thursday.
Did one of John Lennon’s teeth really go up for auction? Sort of macabre if you ask me.
Yeah, I think at that age I might have endorsed YooHoo as holy water!
Tuesday level easy. All the answers were first guess getable even if one didn’t know the answer. More relevantly is it really a Thursday puzzle if the thing that makes it Thursday-ish is just in the clues and not the grid? This puzzle doesn’t really have any twist or theme to it beyond a few wacky clues which you can do any day of the week.
fINISHED and then came here for the explanation, eh!
Well I'm in the "liked it a lot" camp. Fill went in steadily but of course the themers made no sense in relation to their clues and the SPOONERISM revealer was not an aha! but an of c ourse!, and a "how did I miss that". I notice that OFL says that these have been done before and then goes back seven years for an example, which means there's no chance that I will remember it, so this is fine with me.
LOAF before LOLL, and ICALLEDIT before ICALLDIBS. Met another EMMA (granddaughter EMMA starts second grade today, much deliberation about what to wear) and found out what colors MARIO and LUIGI wear, another mystery solved. I'm with @Roo on BACH being a stretch.
Congrats on the debut, JW, Just Wish I'd caught on sooner, and thanks for all the fun.
Hard NO to YAHW_H. The word is based on the four Hebrew letters (the tetragrammaton) that is seen -- but not said in Hebrew -- in the Torah & other ancient texts. In Hebrew & thus in Judaism, the tetragrammaton is considered too holy to be vocalized. Instead, the Hebrew word ADONAI is used. The texts often use ELOHIM to refer to the G-d of the Hebrew people. The Hebrew words HA-SHEM ("the name") & AV ("father") are also used. As written, the clue is wrong & displays an ignorance that is both stunning & vaguely insulting.
Fun fact: LOTR is not a trilogy. Tolkien's publisher insisted on splitting it into three separate books.
1/14/2016
We honeymooned in Hawaii and drove the road to Hana. Along the way we stayed in Wai’anapanapa State Park, which has some amazing coastal scenery to go with its wonderful name
January 14, 2016
I tried this too and came up with Felt Fat but that wasn’t quite right and nothing else made sense.
thank God for the revealer - I was ASEA until then. Post-revealer it WAS easy, but until then I was scratching my head. Did the road to Hana in 1994. Lovely - stopped off at the Black Beach which I will never forget. the name LUIGI is forever tarnished by that lunatic murderer in NYC a few months ago. Very odd way to clue BACH.
No, surely not! The NYT would *never* do something that contrived! 🙃
Next you'll be telling me that the suspiciously domino-shaped mini from a week ago was another cross promotion 😯
I probably had a harder time than most of us, but that's because until I looked it up I had no freaking clue what a SPOONERISM even was.
But if anyone asks I'm just going to say it was a downs only solve, because I also have no scruples
@JJK: The pip game automatically showed up in my app but so far I’ve just found it annoying and not worth the time. I hated Strands at first but am starting to like it better with practice. Another one that I do occasionally is Letter Boxed which can be tricky and a fun challenge.
Oh, this is so good! The Spoonerisms are so smooth, so completely in the language, that they never caused me to question them. I didn't see the trick until I got to the revealer; I kept looking for some sort of letter change.
But I did repeat my very own Mantra [TM] to myself: "When the answer doesn't agree with the clue, the trick is in the clue."
But I was looking for letter changes, not sound changes. Oh how I struggled with trying to turn "Recently dated" into GOOD ENOUGH. Recently daRed? Recently daZed? Recently Mated? Nothing was working.
It was delicious going back to see how good the Spoonerisms were -- once I had the revealer.
This will go into my running list for Puzzle of the Year. Brilliantly done.
Same here. I spent most of my life in or around rural areas and never once saw a chain-link fence around a cattle field.
Yup, did the same. Doh!
Absolutely agree. This clue should have been changed.
I think The Road to Hana is something one only does once!
Once I saw the theme - which immediately brought to mind our Nancy’s SPOONERISM Sunday on 3/15/2020 - I stopped trying to find a trick in the answer and this became quite easy. Fun but not much of a Thursday challenge. I wanted the Mario Brothers to be the Kelce Brothers with Jason in green and the famously engaged Travis in red. I liked KELP crossing KALE but I didn’t love BACH. And while I suppose it is technically an option, I have never seen CHAIN LINK FENCE as a barrier around a field used for cattle. At least in the Midwest, the sight of a chain-link enclosure around a fifty-acre field would be shocking and considered a real novelty.
I’m grateful to RP for providing the origin of the spoonerism. I had no idea, thought it was just a word that someone coined along the way. The funniest ‘one of those things’ I ever heard was an old boyfriend who walked into the room shortly after I had painted my nails and said “I fell sminger nail polish.” He was a young former Marine and not the least bit absent minded, but I guess you could say he just had a Spooner moment.
thank you. great explanation. and totally correct.
Wonderful!
I couldn’t help but recall your Sunday SPOONER outing from 2020 too. :-)
Yes, this took me aback too (book me attack?).
Another nit to pick with the Pips game is that it doesn't follow the rules of dominos. ie, in actually dominos the adjoining pieces have to match numbers. Not in the Pips game
I came here to see if anyone else was scratching their head over CHAINLINKFENCES. I grew up on a cattle farm. Chain link fences as cattle barriers? Nope. Absolutely not a thing. Barbed wire fences. Yes. So, IMHO, better answer would have been BARBEDWIREFENCE with the singular "Battle carrier" as clue.
Played Strat-O-Matic a bit, but misspent much of my youth with APBA Baseball. Great game. I must have been on the company's mailing list because they sent me a gift of two tix to a Phillies game out of the blue. So I got to see Steve Carlton pitch and win. This was in 1972 when the Phillies were awful. Carlton won 27 games that year, 45.8% of the team's total (59): the highest pitcher's proportion of his team's wins in the 20th century. Carlton also led the N.L. in ERA (1.97), strikeouts (310), and innings pitched (346.1) that year and won the Cy Young Award.
Gotta agree - FELL FLAT for me. I almost wished it was a rebus (!)
I thought KALE & KELP were the same thing (?), never heard of YAHWEH, wouldn't know MARIO or LUIGI if I fell over them & I'm still not familiar with anything LOTR. Spoonerism theme was cute, I guess, but not for me today. I'm on my way to check out Erik & Andy's 2018 spoonerism puzzle & 1/14/2016 - thanks for the heads up.
I started playing it when it first showed up. At first I couldnt understand the instructions. Once I did, I found it pretty easy. It's mathy in a Ken Ken way but much easier.
I really needed the revealer for this one. Until I got to it, I was complaining in my head that FREAK OUT was the wrong part of speech for the clue. I think I could have stared at the completed grid for hours without figuring it out.
That said, I grew up in farm country, and have never once seen a CHAIN-LINK FENCE used as a cattle barrier. Not that it wouldn't work, it's just way too expensive.
Otherwise -- do people really eat TV dinners off their LAPs? Why did the good Lord give us TV trays, then? As for KELP, is that what you call an individual plant? That's what "member" implies. "Substance of a marine forest" would do.
32-A has to be the most ridiculous clue ever for ASEA.
Before I got to the revealer I convinced myself that "battle carrier" had something to do with a person who deals in stolen chain mail!!
Three things that send me into a deep funk when used as the basis for a crossword puzzle are anagrams, Tom Swifties, and spoonerisms. If a gun were held to my head and I was ordered to allow one of those things into my cross wording life, I suppose I would admit Tom Swifties. They are sometimes actually amusing. Anagrams not so much and spoonerisms hardly ever. Please stop.
I solved this thing as a themeless, filling in the actual theme answers from enough down crosses to infer some recognizable phrase that, as far as I could see at that point, had no connection to the clue, but looked somehow OK. And then I got the revealer and uttered, “Oh, jeez” and re-read the clues and wished I hadn’t.
I guess the best thing about this puzzle is that the spoonerisms were in the clues and not the answers so that made it kind of challenging.
One question - a sincere one - how does the clue at 53D, “Like 4! and 24”, work? I’ve made it clear before in these comments that I am mathematically challenged and I simply don’t understand this. Got it from crosses but still …
I thought IBM too, but waited for the crosses. AOL is only "early" if by "tech" you mean "the Internet."
Before seeing the revealer, I managed to convince myself that "recently dated" fruit was GOOD ENOUGH to eat.
Me too! I was trying to see how barbed wire or electric fences could possibly fit. Chain link fences are not a thing for cattle. They'd be too expensive and ineffective -- easily pushed over, I'd think.
I do enjoy Spoonerisms though. Just not that particular one.
We had a timeshare at Lahaina, on the west coast of Maui. Hana is on the opposite side of the island. We took a day-long bus tour there. Lovely views, of course. Oprah Winfrey owns several hundreds of acres there.
Pips - not my thing. I've tried but can't get into Strands. Xword, Wordle, Connections & SB "only" ")
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