Hello hello! Today's offering has a fun theme, which will be familiar to most logophiles - the theme answers are all common words with negative prefixes to ... non-word remainders. (This is a very poor explanation. I take heart in knowing that if you're reading this, you've seen the crossword and know what I'm talking about..) Take 24-Across: INDOLENT as an example: The clue reads "Lazy...even though 26-Across doesn't mean active". But there's no 26-Across! But wait, there's a 26-Down which starts at the 'D', and reading across from there, you get DOLENT, which indeed doesn't mean "active" or anything else for that matter. Neat! Surely there are many others besides the five in this puzzle. UNKEMPT sprang to my mind, but I think KEMPT is actually a word meaning the opposite of KEMPT, so that one's no good. UNRULY? DISMEMBER maybe? Please chime in!
Working thru the grid with my usual modus operandi, which is to ignore the theme until the end, I found a mix of 3-letter gimmes like ABS, ORR and BIB, generationally situated ones like SOCIALS (social media apps of course), plus a few names I didn't know (e.g. "First Black Disney princess" = TIANA - perhaps another generational thing? and a Mike POSNER who apparently sang about pharmaceutical ingestion in Ibiza? O-kaayy...)
All in all an entertaining solve, just a little crunchier for me than average on a Tuesday. 4:14 in the end.
I enjoyed this one, and I think the detail of having all the "non-words" be "numbered" was a very fancy touch. Me, I finished in 5:17, and I really wished it could have been 5:16 to match the date. Heh... The things we think of...
ReplyDeleteAlso, just want to give yet another shout out to Monty Python for making me remember Che Guevara's given name. Anybody else remember the "World Forum" skit? Genius.
Hey everyone! I've caught up and am back in the game (see what I did there?). Fun Tuesday puzz. I do recall the Monty Python sketch, of course. Isn't that the one where they quiz famous political thinkers about English Football clubs? My favorite negative non-word in the puzzle is DISCOMBOBULATED.
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