Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, which means it’s a tough one. Yes, it 4-D, eight letters, “Stymies, so to speak.” I got it with a clue here, a clue there.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
1-A, eight letters, “Echoic acknowledgment.”I’m surprised to see that the answer as spelled is far more common than I thought.
3-D, five letters, “Numbers past a certain point.” A nice example of this puzzle’s fancy clueing.
8-D, eleven letters, “Madame Bovary or Jane Eyre.” Gosh, I haven’t heard any form of the answer in ages.
17-A, five letters, “Logging site.” Clever.
18-A, five letters, “Inspiration for Eliot’s 61 Across.” This clue baffled me a bit, as 61-A is not a title.
20-D, four letters, “Fuller shape.” I first thought “Brush?” But the clue didn’t fool me for long.
26-D, ten letters, “Personality pair addendum.” Answers that baffle me usually make sense when I begin typing out their clues. But here, I’m lost.
32-A, ten letters, “Short-term rental.” A novel answer.
46-A, four letters, “[More people should come here].” Or not!
54-D, three letters, “See reverse, shortly.” Well, this is arcane. No, it’s probably not.
61-A, eight letters, “Eliot opus misnomer.” Now I get it.
One clue-and-answer I take issue with: 9-D, six letters, “New York’s Angry Orchard, e.g.” I just don’t see how the answer goes with the brand name. And that was because, as Wittgenstein said, the limits of my language mean the limits of the world.
My favorite in this puzzle: 11-D, ten letters, “Short-term offerings.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Today’s Saturday Stumper
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comments: 5
KNEECAPS. BACKATYA. (I thoughtatcha was the more common form.)
CENTS. ANTIHEROINE. DIARY. DANTE. DOME. NORELATION.
POPUPSTORE. ETAL. (The abbreviation takes the place of names, so, really, no more people should go where et al. goes.)
PTO. (An explanation. But why “See reverse”?)
LOVESONG. CIDERY. (To my mind, calling Angry Orchard, the company or the cider, “cidery” is like calling Modelo “beery.”) LOANERCARS.
Hmm. Paid Tine Off and OverTime Pay ? Or some other pairing not related to a PTO bar?
NORELATION: yeah, I get it. Coming up with an example is difficult. Say you’re watching a chat show and the guest says “I was at a party at John Wayne’s house and the actor David Wayne, no relation, was telling a funny story”.
I think pannonica at Crossword Fiend has it: "Please turn over.” What I found has to do with tractors.
Your party pair makes the clue makes sense, but I still think of people or persons rather than personalities.
I thought Winery, but instead it was a CIDERY in the same sense (a place where cider was maade)....
As Wittgenstein said, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. It never occurred to me that cidery might be anything other than an adjective. But as Merriam-Webster tells me, it’s been a noun since at least 1991.
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