them's crossing words

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Beautiful Junky Mess

by Madeline Kaplan

Oh do I feel like a fool after this puzzle. It's a hard puzzle, don't get me wrong, but I completely butchered the clues that the constructor intended to misdirect. I fell for every one of the traps!

My first pass through this crossword I only managed to slot GEICO and GAB. And even then, I spelled GEICO incorrectly (it's a C, not a K). Things did not get much better from there. I was doomed from the start.

In my naivety, I slotted CARDS for "The Magician's deck" and MOAN for "React to a romantic gesture, maybe" (a little raunchy for your average crossword, but what do I know?). I think my critical thinking skills were sacrificed in my desire to get something on the board. Especially because the spanner references are completely meaningless to me (I never watched Sesame Street as a kid, go figure). ELIMINATES and ILOVETRASH were easy enough to put together after I struggled through the surrounding fill, but I stood zero chance on ALEXADEMIE (who?) and STREGANONA (wat). Hint me, please.

I think most of this crossword is pretty great. I enjoy being at the butt end of a clever misdirect or good wordplay, even if it makes me sound like an idiot when I type out a review. What I don't like are some of the crosswordese phrases that I can never remember, like the clue for NIXED, "Put the kibosh on". Or, how about the made-up word OPPO for "Dirt on a political rival"? You can't convince me that people actually say this stuff. "Pickleback, e.g.": is this even English?

LEVI as "Name on a jeans tag" also has me a little salty. I originally dismissed LEVI as an option because the tag is "Levi's", emphasis on the S (I'm even looking at a pair of jeans right now to double-check). So I guess the "name" part of the clue is supposed to denote that it's not the tag verbatim, but the man himself, Levi Strauss. To which I parry, that's just unnecessarily confusing! In a hard crossword like this one I don't need the constructor making it even harder with some artificial ambiguity. Maybe it's just a me problem.

Anyway, if I were still tracking Taylor Swift references this last week would've been a gold mine.

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