New York Times, Wednesday, May 29, 2019

The seed for this puzzle came to me while on a long drive to a good friend's birthday party. My wife was driving and I was doing some daydreaming while looking out the car window. The phrase "UTTER RUBBISH" popped up and its dual meaning intrigued me. In one sense it means to verbally communicate something, in another sense, its more common one, something else. So, I tried to come up with other examples — "SPEAK VOLUMES" was the only one I could come up with during the ride.

Later that week at home I made a list of synonyms for "talk", and the other entries fell into place, all conveniently the same length.

Thanks to Will and crew for their usual improvements in clueing. Thanks to my wife for driving that day, and to our friend Marian whose birthday begat a puzzle. I hope you enjoyed the solve and found this example of the extraordinary quirkiness of the English language interesting.

It's unusual for Jim and me to agree on which puzzles we liked / didn't care for in any particular week. I always appreciate his counterpoint, which so often makes me curious to go back and take another look.

My first impression of today's puzzle that it was pretty good. Interesting but not flashy theme, generally fine gridwork. So I was surprised to hear Jim say that he would have picked it for his POW! I did like it enough that I gave it a little POW! consideration, but the "a-ha" moment was more of a "okay, got it."

I also had wondered if SPEAK VOLUMES didn't disguise the first word as well as the others. It does have a different meaning — there's no actual speaking when something speaks volumes — but it's not as cleverly disguised as EXPRESS as in EXPRESS LINES.

All in all, it felt like a solid puzzle, certainly above average, but nothing to write home about.

Upon second glance though, I liked it more and more. I hadn't even noticed that each themer was about the written word: MOTTOES, LINES, VOLUMES.

Well, RUBBISH didn't fit that pattern. (Except maybe if you were reading aloud some of my earlier "practice novels." I'm trying to destroy all copies of those floating around.) Such a great bit of wordplay, though! Perfect way to repurpose the great phrase, "talk trash."

There were also a couple of clever clues I glossed over the first time around. The usually ignorable I DO gets an innocent [Pledge of allegiance] treatment. Get it? It's pledging your allegiance to your partner? Fantastic!

I ask for a [Little help?] often. With any luck, one of these days it'll be an ELF answering my request.

Maybe I should have made it my POW! pick. My appreciation rose with my second look, and yet more while writing this post. There is another puzzle later this week though, that resonated more strongly for me.