There He Goes Again Look Crossword
wordplay, the crossword column
As Seen in Chemistry Class
Hal Moore concocts an interesting puzzle.
FRIDAY PUZZLE — When I'm solving a puzzle filled with interesting entries, I look forward to seeing how many of them are debuts, which are words and phrases appearing in the New York Times Crossword for the first time.
That's no small feat, considering the fact that the Crossword is 80 years old. Thank goodness for the evolution of language.
For some reason, the debut of a lively entry is very exciting to me. Then again, I haven't left my house much since 2019, so the bar is low. But I digress.
My source for looking up debuts is XWord Info (some pages require a subscription). The website analyzes each puzzle and shows me the entries that are debuts, those that have been used before and even entries that have not appeared since the editor Will Shortz started working for The Times in 1993, if you can imagine that there even was such a time.
I'm not sure why, after all these years, I'm still surprised when a grid that seems so interesting actually has very few debuts. Hal Moore's puzzle is such a case. The lack of debuts does not in any way make the puzzle deficient. It has more to do with the fact that some of these entries have already appeared in the Times Crossword, albeit once or twice. My memory also performs a brain dump after every puzzle to make space for the next one.
Once again, here is the spoiler jump and, below that, I will discuss entries in Mr. Moore's puzzle.
So there were only two debuts in the puzzle, SOFT TARGET and INNUMERATE, both of which would not have been top of mind for me as answers, although I admired the surgical wordplay in the clue for INNUMERATE: "Unable to perform operations."
There are many terrific entries here, such as LOINCLOTH, SUPERSONIC, DOGMATA, ODD COUPLE, SURF THE NET and CURRY FAVOR. Mr. Moore even brought the country of MOZAMBIQUE back to the New York Times Crossword; it had not appeared since 1979.
The one entry that jolted me, however, was 16A. Not only does the word DOGNAPPER evoke heartbreak and pain among people who have had their beloved dogs stolen, but the clue is flippant and an unfortunate pairing with the entry. DOGNAPPER was used only once before, last May, and the egregiousness of the crime may be the reason it doesn't come up a lot. At least in Dan Schoenholz's puzzle, the word was clued relatively straight, as "Cruella de Vil, for one." And that's only marginally better.
Tricky Clues
23A. Here is a perfect example of a puzzle editor's search for a fresh clue: The entry OAHU has appeared in the New York Times Crossword 306 times and has had a factual clue each time. In this puzzle, however, the clue is "U.S. locale that, when said quickly, sounds like a cheer." Hand up if you sat there trying to say OAHU as fast as you could so that people in your vicinity heard you say, "O-ah-hoo! Wahoo! Wahoo!" Me too.
25A. This is a brilliant, veiled capital clue. "As seen in chemistry class?" sounds fairly general — it could be a beaker or anything else you might see around a lab — but it's not. This type of clue places a proper noun at the beginning of the sentence to hide the fact that the word is actually a name. In this case, "As" is the chemical abbreviation for ARSENIC, and that can definitely be seen in a lab on the periodic table.
29A. The singer and songwriter Mel TORMÉ was known as "The Velvet Fog" because of the smoothness of his voice. Some solvers may not know him as a singer, but if you've ever heard or sung "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)," you now have something to remember him for.
4D. "Unable to perform operations" sounds as if it's about a surgeon who has sutured up her last patient for a while, but this clue is really math-related. If you are unable to understand math or its operations, you are INNUMERATE.
30D. Here's another entry that had only location and factual clues until this puzzle. MOZAMBIQUE had appeared in the Crossword seven times, the last of which was in 1979. The past clues were all geographic, but the one in this puzzle highlights a bit of trivia: the only one-word country that contains all five vowels.
Constructor Notes
I built this "backward," beginning in the southeast and wending my way up to the northwest. Perhaps because English speakers are used to reading left to right, it can be easier to see a grid taking shape when starting near the upper left corner, but some seed entries work better in other areas, where they have more room to breathe.
Here the seed was 57-Across, an artist I greatly admire. He was difficult to clue for a Friday though, so I went with my initial inspiration: my late father, who could happily spend all day in a museum. The 2003 exhibit "The French Taste for Spanish Painting" was one of the last he attended, and the framed poster is still hanging in my childhood home.
Another personal touch is my love of geography, which comes through on the right side with the 10-Down/30-Down pair. I'm thankful that my clue for 30-Down made the cut. There are many potential angles, from the fascinating history of Indian Ocean trade and the development of Swahili to the appearance of a Kalashnikov rifle on a national flag. But when I encountered this fact it was a pleasant surprise, and I wanted to share that feeling.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/crosswords/daily-puzzle-2022-05-20.html