New York Times, Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The basic idea for this puzzle came from a wordplay list I'd compiled much earlier: two-word phrases where the words were the same length and only differed by a few letters. (Actually, the original list was a little broader—it included phrases of three or more words that broke into equal pieces, like WARREN G / HARDING and THICK AS / THIEVES.) I compile a lot of lists like this, usually without knowing exactly what I'm going to do with them. In many cases, seeing the finished list helps me decide.

In this case, I finished compiling the list and didn't do anything with it. (I'm easily distracted sometimes.) Then Will asked me to make a puzzle for this twisty theme week, and I dug the list out of mothballs to see if I could get a 15x15 out of it. Overlapping the two parts and turning the nonmatching letters into two-letter rebus squares seemed like an interesting way to render the entries. For extra consistency, I limited myself to two-word entries of length 7. I also decided to nix entries with only one rebus square (like CULTURE VULTURE) or a hyphen between the words (like TRACTOR-TRAILER). My grid ended up slightly exceeding the usual black-square and word-count maximums, but I'd managed to sandwich in six theme entries, which seemed like an acceptable trade-off.

Two-word phrases, where most of the letters in each word are the same at the corresponding spot. Beautiful example is CRAYOLA CRAYONS, which only differ in their last two letters. Additionally, the crossing answers use both two of the differing letters, i.e. the final A and S of CRAYOLA and CRAYONS get integrated into CEASES.

A picture explains the idea so much better. See the grid below for a visual representation.

I really liked Patrick's top two theme answers, CRAYOLA CRAYONS and FOGHORN LEGHORN. It's neat how the two special cells are right next to each other. I'm not sure why, but that seems elegant. Same goes for HERMANS HERMITS.

Patrick makes a good point about trying to tighten up the theme. The other themers still feel a little haphazard to me though, especially the ones with three special cells. Seems like it'd be much easier to find examples with three differing letters than with only two. Having only super-constrained ones like FOGHORN LEGHORN — only two special adjacent cells — would have been my preference.

Just like all of Patrick's work, it's ultra-smooth, adhering to his exacting standards. This is not at all an easy construction, especially in the bottom corners. Having three patterns fixed into place—the WM, the SC, and the GE special squares — highly constrains the area. That ??WM?? pattern especially … what else besides LAWMAN works? Only LAWMEN, BOWMAN, BOWMEN, NEWMAN. Talk about very little flexibility! To fill this crazy of a grid with virtually no gluey short entries is amazing.

As with great PB puzzles, his clever cluing shines:

• SNOW gets the bizarre-looking [Fall in winter], not needing a giveaway question mark.
• A little shout-out to Barbara Bush with [Barb in a bush] for THORN.
• [You might put a fist through it] feels aggressively violent … except when it refers to an ARMHOLE.

We've seen concepts similar to this one before, so for a "breaking the mold" theme week, it didn't go as far as I would have liked. Still though, a well-executed puzzle.