New York Times, Thursday, August 3, 2023

Adding letters to the front of words isn't inherently theme-worthy because it's so common in English. For it to be fodder for a puzzle, there wants to be as much surprise as possible: the parts should all change meaning entirely, so a solver doesn't see it coming too quickly.

It's also more surprising when the "borrowed" letters are meaningless on their own (eg. INDIG from "SHINDIG") or unrelated to their context (eg. TRAPS from "STRAPS"). I found that if either part is too short or too long, the result tends to feel less transformed and thus less fun, but adding five letters to an unrelated six- or seven-letter word yielded the most unexpected results. I found fewer strong candidates for this theme than anticipated and fit what I could on the grid. And luckily, TAKEFIVE presented itself as a handy reveal to help explain what's going on.

The original wording for the "TAKE FIVE" reveal was a bit sneakier, aiming to delay the "a-ha" by an extra second or two: "... or how to solve each starred clue, from what's left of it". The editors proposed the more straightforward version to calibrate the difficulty level just-so.

It happens that 8/3 is my birthday, so I'll use this space to say "Hi, Mom!" and thanks all for solving! Seeing this puzzle in print today (originally submitted April 2022) is a nice present. Hope you enjoy it.

So many casual solvers have no idea that professional crosswords have themes, and that's what makes them stand out from the computer-generated dreck that many small newspapers run. Even my mother-in-law, who's a dedicated daily solver, is content with filling in most of the Bloomington Herald-Times's crappy auto-generated puzzle. She's incredibly proud of me and brags to her friends about my work, but identifying a crossword theme is as much a mystery as why I'm always in the bathroom for such long stretches of time.

(Hiding from my children.)

There's no way she would have picked up on today's concept, and I almost missed it as well. I'm glad I huddled with Jim Horne to figure out if this was a themeless puzzle or what, because Simeon has an interesting take on the parsing genre. TAKE FIVE = entries "take" five letters from the previous one to form a new and valid entry:

IGNOR / AMUSES

TRAPS / HOOTERS

REVER / BERATES

INDIG / NATION

Jim and I should be indignant that we were such ignoramuses to miss this! The aha is so indirect, though, that the concept didn't strongly reverberate even after I figured iit out.

Would circling the sets of five letters have helped make things clear? Most definitely, but that risks insulting solvers' intelligence. I'm sure there are some people that realized [*Complete fools] — starred even, to make it stand out! — couldn't possibly be AMUSES.

Not this complete fool, unfortunately.

TAIL ENDS messed with me, too. Was that meant to be thematic?

I love the novelty, an innovative approach that throws a rock into the sea of parsing themes. A sharper revealer — maybe running the themers vertically and using HIGH FIVE? — could have elevated this one into POW! consideration.