Mark McClain author page

Modern language study was my favorite academic pursuit in high school and college (though I ended up majoring in economics). I learned Spanish and French as a student, basic German when I was stationed in Heidelberg in the military, and even a bit of tourist Italian. When I started constructing crosswords, I made sure that the 100 or so most common words of several languages were in my word list (to the occasional dismay of some editors). I've used language gimmicks in several puzzles (recently-used answer/clue: TRE — "It's overdue in Italia"). I even did a novelty puzzle in which every single entry (or its clue) was in a language other than English or involved something outside the U.S.

This puzzle has six languages from five different language groups (all Eurasian), with Hindi and Urdu being forms of Hindustani differentiated only by their alphabets and regional/specialty vocabulary. A total of 13 answers are involved with the theme, which makes it undoubtedly the most theme-intensive puzzle I've done. This made for a challenging incidental fill, which was improved a bit with some prodding from Will. I suspect most solvers will figure out the theme early on, but since there's no clue which languages go where, there's still some puzzling to do.

I'm really pleased to make my NYT debut in the Wednesday slot — it's my personal favorite place in the weekday lineup. I like to think of the Wednesday puzzles as "stop and think" difficult. Seldom tough enough to stump the average solver, but usually interesting and clever.

This puzzle's theme (revealed at 38-Down) is in a category that I call "clue-play", in which the chicanery is found in the clues instead of the answers. We've seen several in this vein recently including one with symbols and one with "half-letters" in the clues. I suspected that most solvers would sniff this theme out after they got one or two of the theme entries (or maybe immediately, if they peeked at the reveal entry, which I personally try not to do). I constructed another puzzle similar to this one in which the blacked-out parts of the clues weren't the same word, but rather members of a category. That one's a little trickier.

In terms of the incidental fill, there were some revisions (actually quite a few, I must admit), but one surviving entry that Will really wanted to deep-six was ARNE. Perhaps I'm the only person that does crosswords and also has a CD of Thomas Arne's music on the shelf next to my computer. Despite the objections, Arne could not be expunged from the grid, so there he is for all the classical music haters to gripe about. I don't really see the problem! Arne is obviously more popular than Beethoven, as evidenced by his 17 appearances in crosswords so far this year (compared to only one for Beethoven)! ;)