them's crossing words

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Just Do It!

by Tara V

This last week of puzzles has been a struggle for me, with three out of the seven requiring hints. Today in particular was an absolute hint-fest. I chalk it up to some missing trivia and a completely misaligned plonk compass[1].

Just about everything that I could've plonked I plonked incorrectly. I filled SOAK instead of BASK, WRONG instead of AMISS, EDITORS instead of TESTERS, and POUR instead of BREW. Why did I even bother trusting my gut in this grid? Every plonk came back to bite me, hard.

As for the fill, BAHAI and PEKOE feel like particularly deep cuts. PETE and BROOKE are a total toss-up, just wait for the crosses to fill and guess a name. The usual fare of foreign-language clues were also unwelcome, with AMIE, SER, and DOLCE.

Going back to PETE, what the heck is this referencing?[2] "People seem very concerned for this guy's sake", is this a Kanye West thing? My Google searches are bringing up publications that I would rather not grant pageviews to. Actually, maybe I'm better off not knowing.

As for the theme, there isn't one. At least, not in terms of wordplay. It's just two words having to do with trying something new, with TRYEVERYTHING and BEGINNERSLUCK. Cute, but boring.

"Unlikely to stand the test of time" as TRENDY has my mind going. The clue feels like a philosophical question, are trendiness and historical longevity two related concepts? As a counterpoint, often things that have stood the test of time are TRENDY, like Stoicism and bell bottom jeans. On second thought, maybe not that last one.

As a side note, I feel like the whole META/CLUE pairing is a bit played out at this point, though I can't really critique an Open Submission crossword for the oversight.

  1. If a plonk is a word filled correctly without any crosses, my plonk compass was pointing South the whole solve. Maybe guess is a better word? Are all plonks just guesses? 🤔 ↩︎

  2. It was pointed out to me by a lovely reader that PETE is in reference to the idiom, "For Pete's sake!" ↩︎

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