Instead, all of the terms in question are fun because their meaning has nothing to do with the word they’re substituting for, the word that is a homophone with the exception of its syllable stress, and these examples are actually very hard to come by. 86A, “the summary of an easy negotiation?”, wasn’t easy to figure out:Īs you can see, there’s no rule to the spelling of the word in question, the one whose “weight” you must change from the first syllable to the “second” to get the theme today (ergo the title of the puzzle).
The last three entries were the toughest, for me at least, and required somewhat more complex relettering to get the puns. The other one that was kind of doable was THE MORALE OF THE STORY, which followed that original “add a letter” notion.
I saw the “high kicks” in the clue at 68A and I confess that I thought of the cancan for a minute before “lab studies” led to “rocket science,” which led to ITS NOT ROCKETTE SCIENCE. A couple of the remaining entries rewarded this, at least. If we rely on that one requirement, then we can start having fun with guesses. So now things are seemingly getting more flexible or, perhaps, we’re down to the one requirement of emphasis. Moving down to 33A, “Like ambitious scientists?” we find an entry that adheres to the second rule of emphasis, but instead of adding a letter, we have to do a nano-anagram of “noble” to NOBEL, as in NOBEL MINDED. So now we have two angles to go on for the rest of the solve. There are two apparent alterations here, an added letter “S” (to the common expression “ship of the desert”), and a shift in emphasis from DES-ert to des-SERT, should you choose to pronounce these expressions aloud. Assuming that you know what baked alaska is (and also the admiring moniker of many annelids), this clue kind of solves itself: a “Cruise that specializes in baked alaska, e.g.?” is a SHIP OF THE DESSERT. It isn’t a very difficult one, and I imagine that many of us first stumbled on the trick today right here. Without them, the finer point of the theme was somewhat lost on me - I knew to be impressed, on completion, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.įor the sake of suspense, and also to be true to my own solve, let’s start at the topmost entry. I really struggled to explain the requirement plainly, so I’m especially grateful for the constructor for his notes this week.
There are seven theme entries today, all running across, at 22, 33, 49, 68, 86, 105 and 116, that all adhere to a strict rule (that gets pretty esoteric by the final clue). 54D: Much like the clue for SATAN, this was an odd one, unless you’re used to dogs on the table like ODIE, Garfield’s fall guy (meaning, the guy Garfield would kick off the table).