Sande Milton author page
2 puzzles by Sande Milton
with Constructor comments
See the 7 answer words debuted by Sande Milton.
Sande Milton grew up in Manhattan, cutting his teeth on New York Post puzzles before graduating to the NYT. He received three degrees from Cornell University, in French Literature, Education, and Sociology. He is Professor Emeritus at Florida State University, having taught Educational Policy Analysis and Research Methods. He also consulted on many projects, including holding research seminars in Togo and Haiti for educational policy analysts in Francophone Africa.
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SANDE: Today's puzzle came to pass after lengthy back-and-forths between Jeff and me about the appeal (or lack thereof) of themes where you drop the same letter from real phrases to create funny theme words (letter-drops). When we started on the letter "E," we felt a lack of challenge and newness. So rather than drop "E," the 2nd vowel of the alphabet, we chose to exclude the 3rd vowel of the alphabet. That was perfect because we found a revealer that was spelled from only "legal" letters — EYELESS. And to up the ante, we opted to exclude the same vowel not only from the theme words—but from the whole puzzle!
Well, here's what happens when you do that: you search through the enormous heap of words from your word.lst and delete all words that have the verboten letter, so only "legal" words make up your word.lst. Guess what? Much to my shock, the word catalog shrunk more than 50 percent! There were no longer 232,051 words to choose (from Jeff's magnum word.lst). There were only 110,452. (Gulp!!) After the puzzle was complete, we reasoned, "What the hell! Why not exclude the verboten vowel from the clues as well?" Took me aback; what a challenge that turned out to be too.
Can't say enough about Jeff. How lucky for me to have found such a collaborator.
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SANDE: It's a real thrill to publish my first NYT puzzle. I've been solving these things for over 60 years, first cutting my teeth on the NY Post, then graduating to the Times, in the days when an ANOA would paddle his PROA to a STOA in GOA. The puzzles have changed so much since then. Used to be that if you could find a word hidden away in an old edition of the OED, Britannica or Gray's Anatomy, it was "legal." No brand names, no hip expressions were allowed.
I submitted two puzzles in 1972 when Will Weng was the editor. The daily had a bad word in it, BULTACO (a Spanish motorcycle). I knew the word wasn't legal, but I was hoping that Mr. Weng wouldn't notice it: fat chance!
Decades later, after retiring as a faculty member at Florida State, I brought an idea for a Sunday puzzle to Nancy Salomon, through cruciverb.com. She passed me along to Jeff, and we're now collaborating on our third puzzle. My advice to solvers considering trying their lot at construction: if you love waiting for Fridays and Saturdays, you'll find that constructing your own is like having the hardest Saturday you've ever faced, open and challenging you — all day long. There's nothing like it. But I do recommend working with an experienced constructor: you have a lot more to learn than you think.
This puzzle was a pleasure to work on because the Scrabble theme opened up so many possibilities. The theme is multi-layered. First, there are four racks of mixed-up "tiles," which when solved announce the flow of the game: PLAYERS ARRANGE JUMBLED LETTERS. Second, there's bag of mixed "tiles" (anagrams) in the center section. Finally, the two reveal clues tell you that it's a SCRABBLE game and that there's a MIXED BAG in the middle. So much going on!