Big Talk

by Priyanka Sethy & Ajeet Singh

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• Difficulty: medium

This crossword was a struggle for me. I find my time somewhat inexplicable because I think most of the clues taken in isolation aren't very difficult. But something about them didn't resonate with me and I had a real hard time piecing together the top half of this grid.

For "Toadstools and mildew" I wanted the answer to be MOLDS so badly that I threw out my critical thinking skills and forgot about the first half of the clue. I had a similar mental block with "Tip over one's king, say", where I tried to fill a number of variations of the GIVEUP and GIVEIN variety. MARIAN isn't helping anything in that section of the grid because it feels like a Robin Hood deep cut, but hey, maybe that's my own education letting me down.

Perhaps I would've enjoyed this puzzle more if I liked the acrosses that span the length of the grid, but I don't any words to describe them other than "meh". BLAMESTORM is a phrase I'm unfamiliar with and the clue feels needlessly cryptic. "Confer to pass the buck" is just weird English. Who says that? This is one of the few cases where I feel like the Puzzmo hint is better than the original clue ("Group meeting where people may accuse and point fingers").

FINISHLINE caught me unawares because I had always assumed that a FINISHLINE was made with a thin strip of paper, not a piece of tape. But hey, you live and you learn. I just can't say this time that I enjoyed the process of doing it.

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