Awkward Forms

I'll put the theme/partial count table here eventually. Cells with asterisks in them will indicate my favorite puzzles in the week in these categories: best daily theme, best daily themeless, and best Sunday overall. The themeless choice was pretty close this week between Karen's two puzzles, but in the end I felt that the slightly higher JQXZ content of the NYT wasn't enough to make up for entries like ANAS, EAP, EROSE, and NAES.

The way I'm tentatively planning to run this blog is that each week I'll write a main paragraph about the topic of the week as indicated by the post's title, and then use the rest of the space to discuss various odds and ends from the puzzles of the week. As I'm writing this, I realize I probably should have written more down during the week and saved myself some time now, but, live and learn.

Anyway, "awkward forms"--these are things like ELATER or REJUMP (stuff Orange refers to as "roll-your-own" entries), as well as things like NAHS and (the entry which prompted this topic) ICE IN. ICE IN is a particularly interesting case, because I can't find but 4 places where this phrase was used in the active voice. Searching for "ice in" is useless, because of things like "is there ice in space?" or "put some ice in the blender". However, searching for "will ice in", "has iced in", "may ice in" yield much fewer results, and none of the ones I found used "ice in" as a verb. I was able to find some uses by searching for "iced us in"--this phrase got 7 Google hits, one of which was spurious (...while they de-iced us. In...) and two of which were copies of one of the other pages. So, why don't I like this type of entry? Because for the most part they're things I could never imagine saying, or hearing, or reading, or in general encountering in anywhere except crosswords. They're like obscurity (ESNE, ADIT, etc.) in that sense, though they are less objectionable because at least in this case a solver can figure them out despite having never heard them, but they're still awkward.

---------------Various Comments---------------

Monday

NYS--All the theme phrases were nice, though they did seem to be arranged in most-to-least-interesting order. I wonder if, for a Monday, perhaps shading/circling the sections of the theme entries that were fish might not have been unwarranted.

NYT--I don't think rhyme themes are that interesting, but early in the week themes are forced to be pretty simple. I think they're more interesting than clue themes like the DECK theme in the LAT (which I rated a -1), and less interesting than well-done synonym themes like the BRAVE/VALIANT/FEARLESS theme in CSYN (which I rated a 1), so I'm going to rate this one a 0. See? Math! Though if the rhymes were all one syllable or otherwise less interesting, I'd probably give it a -1.

CSYN--29D {What a cedilla indicates} for SOFT C was a nice change of pace, for me, from the standard {City leader?} type of clue that usually accompanies this sort of entry. 55D is RSTU. I'll put it to a vote: Should entries like these be counted in the "partials" section, because they could (theoretically) be clued as {"Q, ___, V" (lyric in a children's song)}? Either way, I don't like them--all the "clever" cluing options for them have been played out by now. Just try using them in a sentence! "Oh, I've alphabetized most of my books, but I'm still sorting through the RSTU titles."

LAT--BOW seemed off; the shape of farfalle is almost always described as "bow-tie", though there are some citations for just "bow".

Tuesday

NYT--I'm *very* picky about gimmick puzzles. The central thrust of this one was fairly elegant (writing DIAMOND STATE in the shape of a diamond), but the other bits (the DEL* phrases, DOVER as the explanatory entry) seemed tacked on and arbitrary. The pieces of this gimmick don't really work together, IMO.

CSYN--I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's pretty ironic that the "redundancy" theme pops up as frequently as it does.

Wednesday

NYT--MET EXPECTATIONS seems a pretty weak link; the others at least come close to being baseball-specific. I even liked RED PEPPER despite not being familiar with the "practice session with multiple balls on the field" meaning of "pepper"; I knew of that concept in baseball practice but didn't know what it was called--I thought "pepper" was an interesting, evocative term for it and enjoyed learning it.

NYS--This one was my favorite from the week. The concept was a nice twist on a standard trope, and all the entries (especially BANNED CURRY) were amusing.

Thursday

NYT--That's a pretty neat find that these two phrases break up so cooperatively, and the "handheld/holding hands" connection in the explanatory entry was a great capper. Interesting trick used to get the theme entries "in order"; if they were all across, one of them would read as ASSISTANT PERSONAL DIGITAL. A similar trick was used in "Space-Age Greetings" in the Sun by Ken Stern.

NYS--I appreciate the cleverness behind the clue {One unlikely to perform a bar mitzvah?} for SHYSTER, but in general, I prefer clever clues when they're short and punchy. There are a few exceptions, like {People who tend to steer out of control} for RODEO CLOWNS (from one of Frank Longo's books), but in that clue there are double meanings throughout the entire clue--in the SHYSTER clue, the double meaning is in "bar mitzvah" and the rest of the clue is doing framing work to make the answer fit. Again, like I said, I do appreciate the cleverness though.

Friday

NYT--Most of the short entries seem pretty awkward here. ITES, RINA, MAU, ARB, ANC, etc. None of the clues really grabbed me...{One might have a stunt double} for ACTION MOVIE seemed awkward; people have stunt doubles, not movies, at least in my idiom. I don't think ITES really makes sense as an entry...what about {Adverb suffix} for EDLY? -ITE is a suffix, -S is a suffix, but ITES just seems to be a tetragram that's at the end of a lot of nouns. But then I'm no linguist.

NYS--I think this is one entry short of being a good theme...another XYZ entry would have made it for me. But there probably isn't one besides XYZ AFFAIR. I really didn't like 36-Down {Miguel's twin sister in a PBS cartoon}--MAYA. Here's why: I like trivia clues where the answer, in retrospect, is more fitting and even more obvious than perhaps it initially seemed; see below for a few examples. (Oh, because ALEPH is the first Hebrew letter! I get it, Bill W. founded AA, so his wife founded the organization for family members! And so forth.) This clue, for me, did the exact opposite. It seems expressly designed to make the solver think the answer is DORA; otherwise why wouldn't the clue be {Miguel's twin sister in "Dora The Explorer"}? But it isn't, and when I finally abandoned that entry and figured out that the answer was MAYA, the feeling wasn't one of "aha!" but of "how the hell was I supposed to know that?" I don't mind misdirection in general, but this just seemed unfair and uninteresting. Also, FWIW, Alan Olschwang has already done a hidden ABC theme in the Sun (a rebus, actually, but it also used the entries T[AB C]OLLARS and REH[AB C]ENTER). This did not affect the rating of the theme, however.

WSJ--Great theme entry selection, and very smooth fill.

Saturday

NYT--I don't like EAP; it, like the "awkward forms" entries, is at least figure-out-able, but it's used very infrequently in the language (EAP "Edgar Allan Poe" gets about 10,000 hits, viz. FDR "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" with over 5,000,000--and a lot of the EAP pages are hits because "eap" is in the webpage url as just a way of not having to write out edgarallanpoe.html). As such, I tend to think of these entries as being about the same quality as other infrequently used abbreviations like AFG(hanistan) or EPISC(opalian), perhaps more or less so depending on their relative commonness.

Sunday

NYT--Pretty good. NO WEAN SITUATION seemed kind of strained, but the rest were nice.

My favorite clever/tricky clues:
NYS Wednesday, 25D: {Outback steak source, for short}--CROC
NYT Saturday, 60A: {Bump in the road?}--REAR-ENDER

My favorite trivia-style clues:
NYS Monday, 35D: {He's hit home runs in more major league ballparks than anyone}--SOSA
NYS Wednesday, 40D: {Kitah ___ (first grade, in Hebrew)}--ALEPH
CSYN Wednesday, 47A: {Bell-ringing site at 4:00 EDT}--NYSE
NYS Friday, 26A: {"Universe ends as ___ wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette" (headline in the Onion)}--GOD. Hee hee hee.
NYS Friday, 58D: {Magazine that "The Diving Bell And The Butterfly" author Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of}--ELLE
WSJ Friday, 99A: {Group founded by Bill W.'s wife}--AL-ANON
NYT Saturday, 23D: {Classic game with 13 categories}--YAHTZEE
NYT Saturday, 30D: {Work on it began in Rome in 1817}--ERIE CANAL

Entries I don't think have dictionary nature: HAD AN EDGE, IN A MOMENT (...MINUTE, SECOND seem fine to me, but I've never heard any one use this one by itself. Most Google hits seem to be stuff like "in a moment of insanity, I offered to have Emmers spend the night..." From the blog "Ashley's Closet", should that snippet pique your interest.), IT IS SO, IT'S A SNAP, JETS FAN, NOT OK, NOW I GET IT, OLE OLE, ONE-TEN, SEES ALL. I'm on the fence about two of these though; as always, I welcome rebuttals.

I know that was all rather long and disorganized; I'm trying to think of better and more streamlined ways of doing this. Thanks for reading.