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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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103 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.
Yep. In my world (very close to yours) the only time I see a CHAINLINK fence is to keep a pet dog in the backyard. Seems like a very expensive option for cattle!
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 …
How must you feel as a crossword-setter named Joel and you write the clue “Follower of Joel” and it’s not your last name?
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" ")
Always get a kick out the Spoonerisms. This ThursPuz theme usage of it was pretty tame, however. Two recent "Spooneruntisms" runtpuzs [yo, @kitshef] Spooned both the clues and their answers, f'instance.
staff weeject pick: SMS. I'm sure I've seen this before, and it just won't stick in the M&A brainpan storage area.
some fave stuff: PROOFREAD & its clue. AIRPLANES clue. PAELLA spellin challenge. PIGSTY.
Thanx for the foodgun, Mr. Woodford dude. And, of course, thanx to Mr. food-Word, too boot. And congratz on yer nice debut offerin.
Masked & Anonymo6Us
... and now, for a pup that's almost Spoonerisms on Steroids! ...
"Blended Makeup" - 7x7 12 min. themed runt puzzle:
**gruntz**
M&A
This fell flat for me at first, but I gotta take the blame for that, as I didn't read the revealer carefully enough. If I had read "feature of the CLUES" carefully and figured out decently dated, go nuts, cattle barriers, and lacked punch, I would have had a fun Aha! moment before reading Rex. So, my bad. Now that I get it, I think it's clever! Thank you, Joel.
Had a little trouble in the SW trying to make BARN work instead of FARM, and PALM instead of AQUA, but that was short lived. Thought "Here's the scoop!" was a fun clue for LADLE.
The “!” operation means multiply all the whole numbers from the starting value down to 1. So 4! = 4•3•2•1 = 24
When an exclamation mark follows the number, as in 4!, it denotes a factorial. The factorial of a positive integer is the product of all positive integers less than or equal to that integer. For example, 4! is calculated as 4 X 3 X 2 X 1=24. I think you learn that in pre-calculus class.
I enjoyed the puzzle and the spoonerisms, although technically I agree with the objections about chain link fences not being used for cattle. My only problem came when, having "pi" in place, I entered "pie" instead of "pip" for the Domino's logo. That slowed me down in that section for a while. My thought about the clue for "skit" was that it referred to skits performed during USO shows at military camps to entertain the troops overseas.
Easy-medium.
EMMA, STA, and ASEA were WOEs.
Costly erasures - palm before AQUA (I fell for the misdirect) and rsS before SMS.
Mildly amusing and reasonably smooth, liked it a bit more than @Rex did.
Just did a hike where i had to use a stile over a barbed wire fence to get in and out of a cattle pen. no one ever uses a chain link fence for this. wooden or barb wire
BACH is one of the worst clued answers I've ever seen
Thanks for finding the date on that puzzle. What is the search one uses to find old puzzles?Thank you.
I am not myself observant, but I think Orthodox Jews would find filling in the Yahveh clue problematic. The problem starts with the Third Commandment:
"You shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold guiltless he that takes his name in vain." ( Exodus 20:7 in the KJV)
For this reason, observant Jews when speaking of God, refer to the deity as "ha'Shem" (literally, "the Name"). This usage is also part of modern Hebrew speech even among nsecular Israelis who often say "todah la'Shem" ("thanks to the Name," i.e., "thank God") or "baruch ha'Shem" ("blessed be the Name," i.e., "blessed be God") on hearing good tidings. Also liturgically the name of God in the Torah is prononced euphimistically as "Adonai" (literally, "my Lord"). -
The custom of not explicitly mentioning God's name is especially observed in writing, out of concern that a document containing any version of God's name might one day be torn up or discarded, thereby potentially destroying the name of the deity. Consequently, tattered a sacred books and even commercial documnts containing God's name (including versions such as "Adonai" and "Elohim")which are no longer usable are not discarded, but are either buried ceremonially, or are preserved in a special storage room ("genizah"), the most famous of which is the Cairo Genizah in which were stored unusable religious and commercial documents which mentioned God's name, covering more than thousand years from the 6th to the 19th centuries CE. The existence of the genizah became known in the West in the late 18th century, but it was only researched methodically following a visit to it in1896 by two Scottish sisters (Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson) who brought fragments to Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), a lecturer in Talmud at Cambridge University. Schechter excavated and researched 100,000 pages of documents found in the genizah, and thus contributed immensely to present-day knowledge of medieval Judaism and commerce.
One other point. The precise pronunciation of the 4-letter Hebrew word denoting God is not known (and thereforer the clue is fuzzy). At the time of the 2nd Temple (destroyed by the Romans in 70CE) on Yom Kippur the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple only once a year where he would ponounced this name of God, while the crowds in the Temple courtyard prostrated themselves. The account from the Mishnah in poetic form is part of the Yom Kipput Orthodox liturgy and some congregants and the cantor prostrate themselves when the cantor chants "on hearing the holy and awe-inspiring name uttered explicitly by the High Priest, the people in the Temple couryard would bow down and prostrate themselvs."
Anonymous 11:29 and JT also at 11:29. Thanks for the very clear explanations.
I hear your history, but I for one take deep inspiration from the glory and power of all the names that identify our Lord. I do not think we diminish His holiness by calling Him who He is. We respect one another when we use personal names. Cannot this also be so in our relationship with our Creator, who indeed made us relational beings?
The road to HANA is stunning, so much so that it became the middle name of one of my granddaughters.
@egs I know I speak for the many; Where are you? This is your perfect puzzle! I hope you're ok. I'll check back later.
I don’t like it at all.
After I was unable to massage the entries GOOD ENOUGH and FREAK OUT into anything approximating the meanings of "Recently dated" and "No guts," I thought, Okay, time to look more closely at the clues - which can also be phrased as: Time to apply Nancy's Dictum. First: were the clues anagrams? No. Then: how about a first letter reversal? Yes! SPOONERISMs! After that, even knowing what I was supposed to be doing, the twistiness of the operation still provided plenty of fun.
I see @Rex's point about the theme entries lacking the extra flourish of being somehow related; still, I forgive all, since spoonerisms are one of my favorite kinds of word play. I think I fell in love decades ago when reading fractured fairy tales to my kids, which featured, for example, Rindercella going to a bancy fall in a dragnificent mess and later slopping her dripper. Fun to show the kids how much fun you can have with language.
Nice ones, Lewis! Dell won.
I agree. Chain link fences are too expensive for farms. But then I thought maybe a stockyard could have a chain link fence around it? I don't know because that's not the kind of place I hang out.
Villager
Also, be if the reasons we had TV trays was because the aluminum of the TV dinner was hot. Unless people were letting their dinner get cold before eating it which doesn’t seem like a good way to eat those.
I seem to be hard to please lately, so I'm glad to report I liked this much better than Rex. When I got to the revealer, I didn't read its clue properly and was baffled how you can make any of those answers into Spoonerisms. Oh, the *clues* are Spoonerisms! And I got some chuckles out of them, eg "Packed lunch".
Agree with those that comment you don't build chain link fences for cows. Ball fields, tennis courts, etc, yes. And several of my neighbors have them around their front yards.
I liked the "marine forest" clue for KELP. On several ocean kayak trips, we were always running into bull kelp, in the sea and on the beach. Really weird alien-egg-sac looking things!
@Whatsername, thanks for the little review of those games. I like Letterboxed too (usually) and will probably look for Pips out of curiousity.
I used google, with crossword shes heaving loam as my search words.
Same here. I tried with the answers!
Same here. I tried it with the answers! Glad I wasn't the only one
This was Carola. I forgot to check whether Google had signed me ou.
@Nancy, I remembered your Mantra when solving. Great advice!
Fun fact: AOL just recently announced it was shuttering its dial-up service. Now what will I do with all those free CDs?
My recollection from college religion class (40 yrs ago) is that it is spelled YHWH. Ancient Hebrew did not indicate vowels. Yahweh is how most people spell it in in English but some use Yehovah (YHVH).
I thought this puzzle was fine until Rex reminded us that it's so similar to the Agard-Kravis puzzle from 2018. Ugh. This is lazy editing. The revealer is (almost) identical and in the same place! As someone who has had a bunch of much better puzzles rejected by the NY Times, I'm always very bummed/discouraged to see ones like this make the cut.
Domino's pizza sucks, Tom Monaghan's politics suck (but the Tigers won the world series when he owned them). I was in Everglades City a few years ago, it is in the middle of nowhere. Looking for a restaurant Google maps sent me 40 miles to Ave Maria FL to a brewpub. Ave Maria is a brand new pre-planned city rising out the swamps of southern Florida with a giant Catholic church in the middle of "town" and it's founder is Tom Monaghan. So after avoiding him and his politics in Michigan I inadvertently found myself in his utopia.
@mathgent, now I will have an earworm of the Loggins & Messina song, Lahaina. 🎵She said look out there’s a centipede coming your way🎵
Here’s my favorite: The Baltimore Orioles had a centerfielder whose name gave his occupation when Spoonerized. I’ll post the answer in another comment.
That’s Paul Blair (the baul plair).
Wikipedia suggests that the main restriction is not to read the word aloud.
I am sure I enjoyed Nancy’s puzzle with spoonerisms because I really enjoy Nancy and admire her puzzles. I DID finally figure out that the clues were spoonerisms and, while it didn’t help me solve the puzzle, I saw why the random across entries made sense. Seemed a bit on the easy side (for a Thursday) otherwise. However, I’m in @les’s camp in that Swifties and spoonerisms are not my cuppa.actually, the fact I could work it as a themeless was a plus for me.
Ditto @Bob Mills et al! Accordingly, the revealer . . . revealed! It’s been soooo long since we had a spoonerism puzzle. Liked it more than many, I suspect.
Ese es mio.
I'm swimming in a sea of "what'n the heck" as usual on Thursdays (and it's why I like 'em the most) and I have literally no clue what's happening at all until I'm almost finished with the whole puzzle and I finally see SPOONERISM. Oh. Sheesk. Probably everyone else got it right away. Sigh.
Super challenging and super fun. Didn't know EMMA, but nothing else seemed likely and I misspelled BAWL as BALL (different kind of wailing) and I wasted a long time tracking down the typo.
After yesterday's pro-Patchett discussion, I am electing to finish the book. Starting to think it might finish with a meth-fueled gang riot and car chase.
❤️ TV tray LAP. FREAK OUT.
😩 BACH as horrendously clued.
People: 8
Places: 2
Products: 4
Partials: 6
Foreignisms: 2
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 22 of 78 (28%)
Funny Factor: 5 😄
Uniclues:
1 Omar the Perfectly Acceptable.
2 What 🦖 has done for 18+ years in public.
3 I am a pirate / I'm a little bit young-ish / no parrot or patch (yet)
4 Weeping on the rug.
5 Talk right.
6 Edits the memoir, "Living in the shadow of my brother."
7 Bite mark from improv class.
1 GOOD ENOUGH ARAB
2 FILL FREAK OUT
3 ASEA LAD'S HAIKU
4 FELL FLAT BAWL
5 RUIN SPOONERISM
6 PROOF READ LUIGI
7 TIGER SKIT SORE
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Comic-Con attendees in a mosh pit. KLINGON SHOVERS.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel Rex was far too harsh with this one. I successfully filled in the puzzle but without comprehension, due to not attending to the revealer clue carefully enough, but then when I understood, big Aha! and thought the spoonerisms were fairly cleverly chosen. (So to Rex I say, why not these spoonerisms?) I expect the constructor thought of those himself, and it might not have been easy, so credit where it is due.
Nits: do people actually say BACH as short for Bachelor(ette)?? There was nothing in the clue to suggest an abbreviation (it said "informally"). All that was in my head was J.S. Bach -- completely mystifying. Also agree that 9 down, a name for God, didn't take into account how this could strike Orthodox Jews, and surely there are many in the puzzle-solving community. And ASHY and ASHE don't seem great together. But okay. So it's not perfect. But "the most regular-ass puzzle imaginable"?? Imaginable, you say? Get out of here. The John Lennon clue alone disqualifies it from such ignominy (what's that story about, I wonder?).
In answer to Rex's question about whether people still eat TV dinners: lots of elderly people turn to them when they are too tired to cook, particularly if it means cooking for just one person. I don't think they care if they are dated to mid-late 20c and therefore passe. They're hungry and it's quick.
@Okanaganer -- Yank thou.
This one nearly flummoxed me. The solve was whooshily easy for the most part, with a few clues that were a bit sketchy. Weakness, for example does not always equate with ANEMIA. That clue needed some sort of qualifier.
On the other hand, I enjoyed the clues for PROOFREAD (“mark one’s words?), AIRPLANES (they might have their noses turned up), LADLE (here’s the scoop!) and FARM (stable environment?).
Cleverness aplenty, just not with the theme. It felt to me as if Joel Woodford decided to construct a SPOONERISMS themed puzzle and fixed a grid and filled in the theme parts. Then, he decided to make a themeless puzzle and filled the remainder of the grid with what solves as a pretty easy themeless throughout. A tale of two puzzles wrapped up as one.
Then there’s the theme. Together, the theme entries seemed unrelated to anything - each other or the puzzle as a whole - and dull to boot. Got to SPOONERISMS and wanted to be excited. I remembered the last spoonerism theme that was so long ago because I enjoyed it. This one not so much.
First of all, I tried to flip the theme answers and doing so made things worse. No theme resolution. Hmmmmm. So I flipped the clues and bingo. Oh, ok, but why? For this theme to function smoothly and with some punch, in my opinion, there must be connection among the theme answers that somehow makes sense of their being SPOONERISMS that together convey a gestalt other than “Huh, the ‘related’ clues are all SPOONERISMS. Big whoop . . . “ or not. For me, definitely not - at least from a theme perspective, but the solve was fun and had some excellent spots. Congrats to Joel Woodford on a worthy and enjoyable debut puzzle albeit an easy one for a Thursday. More, please!
We spent a week in Everglades City once. There are definitely places to eat there, buy mainly only if you like things fried and salty.
I agree the puzzle did not have a lot of pizzazz (sp?) But I enjoyed the spoonerisms I was totally confused about 41 A before that. I had reasoned that "Recently dated" might mean a food was not too old to eat and that a person with "No guts" might freak out at something scary, but I could NOT rationalize 41A.
I think I got to the reveal before 52 A. Then everything became clear and amusing.
I have to ask: How did "Feature of the CLUES for 17, 25, 41 and 52 across" lead so many to try to spoonerise the ANSWERS?
@ Lewis: Brilliant. Thanks for the fun.
@mmorgan 7:56 AM
I drove that full circle and the road FROM Hana along the volcano was so intense and I loved it more than the road to Hana. Thanks for reminding me of a wonderful memory.
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