Hey am I forgetting something, or is this an historic moment -- the first time the same answer appeared twice in an NYT Crossword puzzle? Tautology and tautology! (Is it me, or is it me?)
1
Am I wrong or should 40A read “22+ volumes,” not “22+ pages?”
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The OED is 20 volumes. The clue refers to the "set" entry, which runs 22+ pages.
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Ah. Got it. Thanks for explaining.
Aaaah!
Got in a bad mood when I read the clue to 17A, because I really dislike cross-references. Looked at 58A and got even grumpier, because I double-dislike self-referential cross-references.
So I almost decided not to bother with the puzzle, but went a little bit further anyway. Then the clue at 25A reminded me that it was anything-goes Thursday, and that the cross- and self- and circular referrences just might be the heart of the theme. Better to take the challenge and continue.
So glad I did.
Like Deb and others, I thought TAUTOLOGY meant the same thought in different words. I had TAUTOLOGY at 58A, I kept trying to get something similar at 17A. Eventually gave up and entered TAUTOLOGY again, and all was well. Wasn't so sure about RECRUSIVE, but it seemed okay. Loved AMBIGUITY.
It was different around the puzzle's waist. I had a few letters in 36A, and knew there was no 66A, but I wasn't getting anywhere. I wanted something starting with BLIND. EMO as clued was strange, which made OMNI and ZOO take a while. Thought of YAMS before HAMS (neither of which I eat at Xmas). BUM DEAL took forever, because I wanted BUM RAP, but BUM WRAP sure didn't work.
I think I've heard of Jeff PROBST, although I avoid "Survivor," but Mike ROWE and his shows (if such they are) were unknown.
This one made me -- and my brain -- work. I like that.
Thank you, Alex, congratulations, and come back soon.
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Very nice puzzle. Thanks!
I loved Logic. Thank you Prof. John Glanville, San Francisco State.
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I'll join the chorus. I really enjoyed this one (even though it took me longer than usual and I needed one look up - Rowe -- in order to complete it.) But it was great fun. I particularly liked A WILD GOOSE CHASE and loved the misdirect for SAFARI.
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Since 'reiterative' and 'iterative' mean the same thing, shouldn't 'recursive' and 'cursive' also mean the same??
Enjoyed the solve enormously. Thanks, AlexE, for proving there's more than one way to learn a taut ology.
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Cursive is the style of writing you use when writing imprecations.
Recursive is the style you use when writing _about_ imprecations.
Et viola.
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David,
You're conflating recurse and metacurse. The implication is one never metacurse not worth imprecating.
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Oh, I loved this one! Deceptively ordinary clues with unexpected but perfectly sound answers, with added "wait, what?" What could be more fun?
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Great puzzle! Just tricky enough. COUNTMEIN, BADDEAL and BARTAB threw me for a bit, but it all worked out in the end.
So many clues to so dislike:
“Click on it” ICON Should be “YOU click on it” “Click on it” is puzzle trick and a fragment and annoying.
Prefix with gender: CIS At this point this answer is “Not just any old” tired answer. It is THE tired answer. And autocratic. Please proselytize somewhere other than in a puzzle I paid for.
“Burst of laughter” PEAL is ok, GALE not so much. If you have to go to the last definition in a dictionary, you’re groping. This from my MacBook dictionary:
“a burst of sound, especially of laughter: she collapsed into gales of laughter.”
Translated: “she collapsed into gales of laughter of laughter” Did the puzzle maker mean to toss in this TAUTOLOGY? I’m betting not.
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I’m surprised you think CIS is proselytizing. It’s simply a prefix. How do you feel about the prefix HETERO- ?
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deb, i took the constructor’s statement as a tribute to his professor’s ability to ‘totally’ keep him from dozing at such an ungodly hour. terrific thursday puzzle. hi everybody...still lurking, always solving!
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Nice to know you're out there, Laurence.
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Plenty of FITS and starts in my solving experience, so why was it so enjoyable? The exquisite theme!
Speaking of bad dreams, here’s a too long but true story of a nightmare from my dissertation defense: after an hour, one professor suddenly began peppering me with a series of increasingly difficult questions. As soon as I’d start to answer one correctly, he’d fire another one at me. I was dancing as fast as I could, but before long we were far afield from my dissertation topic. Then he said, “Why didn’t you make any use of ...” and he named a book I not only hadn’t read but hadn’t ever heard of. I sat there stunned, and it felt just like that dream. Time stood still, and I just looked down at the floor, until my advisor said, “Oh for god’s sake that book doesn’t come within a thousand years of his time perod.” Five minutes later, the dissertation had been unanimously approved. But deep down inside there is a part of me that is still looking down at that floor.
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There's a special place for ORALS war stories in every academic's past. My primary teacher advised me prior to orals, "Just get two of them that you know don't like each other arguing with each other. It'll take all the heat off of you!" And...he was right!
5
Fun puzzle. I enjoyed the logical terms.
I would have enjoyed seeing the 15-letter BEGS THE QUESTION clued properly for its original logical meaning, rather than its universally misused "raises the question" meaning. I have no clue how to clue it, though, in today's thematic style.
I just noticed that my LA-Z-BOYAGER reply on another thread appeared twice, even though I only submitted it once. Yea, comment system!
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Perhaps like this, assuming it appeared across the center row:
36. If 36-Across, then 36-Across.
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"QUOTE" in the NE, worked with ESSEN (a gimme), leading to TENOR for the quartet component, and I don't watch Survivor. So I needed SPACE to fix everything. As for the rest, I did it without really knowing what I was doing. Did I like it? Hmmm. It was neither in my wheelhouse nor up my alley, is all I can say.
On the bright side, I'm now using paper straws. My mother never warned me about the lip wrinkles so I'm afraid that ship has sailed (and anyhow I smoke, very bad for lips not to mention other parts; also I forget to use sunscreen - why am I still here??).
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Hand up for quote and tenor.
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Hand up for quote, but recovered before tenor.
I do want to mention 9D. I assumed SAFARI was some kind of app. Didn't get the big game misdirect until I came here. Good one!
As for the theme (which was good), I felt that the grid was somehow too small to contain it. Does anybody get what I mean? Because I'm not so sure myself.
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But...tautology isn’t just repeating the exact same thing, it's using different words to express the same idea. I couldn't figure out another word for tautology so it slowed me down. I guess I'm too far past my college logic class to remember the other logic ideas (specifically recursion). I look forward to the Thursday tricks these days, but this one required far more help than usual.
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As a computer programmer, I really enjoyed this one.
I believe that a tautology is a logical statement that is self-evidently true, like if A, then A. It needs no other logical statements (axioms, or previously proven theorems) to establish its truth. I don’t believe A = A is a tautology, but rather a statement whose truth depends on the foundational axioms of logic. For example, I f A is a Real Number, A = A depends upon the definition of equality (A = A <=> A - A = 0), the axiom that establishes the existence of 0, the axiom that establishes the existence of a unique opposite for any non-zero A, the definition of subtraction as adding the opposite, and the axiom that the sum of any non-zero A and its opposite is 0.
Perhaps someone else will chime in here to show that if A, then A is not a tautology, but needs it’s own proof dependent on lower level logical axioms? However, it seems to me that one only needs to understand the process of establishing the truth of a conditional statement to prove if A, then A: Assume A is true. That allows one to affirm the antecedent of if A, then A, which is the A between the if and the then. Affirming the antecedent of any conditional statement allows one to also affirm that statement’s consequent, in this case the A that follows the then. QED.
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Sometimes I feel like the A between the if and the then.
Thank you. You've just confirmed my faith in the existence of a unique apposite.
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I regret to announce that, after many months of faithful service, my crossword-solving pen gave up the ghost on my commute this morning, after entering only 4 answers. I was not carrying a replacement, so had to wait to get to work to finish. Got a kick out of the theme. This being Thursday, having TAUTOLOGY in the grid twice didn’t faze me, we’ve seen it happen before. Generally not a fan of cross-referenced clues, but happy to make an exception today. Well done Alex, and I admire your perseverance.
VIOLA before CELLO and BARTAB before BARBET.
Eager to cash in on the popularity of “Star Trek” (which really wasn’t all that popular at first), Leonard Nimoy recorded a couple of albums that have become collector’s items for Trekkies. They feature a predictable mix of laughable, Spock-inspired originals and covers of folk-rock tunes, which Nimoy either narrates or gamely tries to sing. The cringe-worthy “Highly Illogical” relates the observations of an alien trying to make sense of human behavior, ca. 1966:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C70QRbawN8
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Condolences on your pen's demise. Well done, good and faithful servant.
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Enter into the rest prepared for thee.
(taps plays gently in the distance)
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What RMP and DC said.
The pen is dead; long live the pen.
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I am sure Messeurs Batali and Probst are wonderful people, but they have no connection to my world. Otherwise, a very "gettable" puzzle. I remember fondly the wonderful hours spent with my spouse playing Myst. My eyes get misty thinking about it; I miss those days.
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I plugged along with this puzzle, not knowing where it was going, but I got
there. I knew 17a and 58a were the same words. I filled in tautology and
had to google the word, as I did not know what the heck it meant. A
very challenging exercise in all.
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I found this one difficult in many ways. Really enjoyed it!
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I started the puzzle in the usual way - filling in the across answers that I knew for sure, then the downs - but about halfway through I started saying "what???" to myself several times. But, I plugged along and did finish the puzzle, not knowing the theme. Thanks, Deb, for the explanation.
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The instant when what was totally illogical became totally logical -- in the quirkiest kind of way -- was one of the best aha moments I can remember.
Thank you, Alex Eylar, for a most original Thursday that started out as what seemed AWILDGOOSECHASE only to end up making all the sense in the world.
And congratulations on your debut! Enjoy your day!
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I’ve got the entire puzzle finished, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why the app doesn’t agree. I must have something wrong, but every answer I’ve seen in the comments thus far also appears in my grid. Either way - a really fun puzzle and a nice alternative to a rebus-involved theme.
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The link to today's puzzle at xwordinfo.com will take you to a completed puzzle grid if you want to check square-by-square.
Aha - I had SOFARI for 9D, which I've heard people use as a term for sitting around on the couch. "Big game" = animals, not football.
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Had never heard of SOFARI, but that's hilarious and I can't wait to use it on the DHubby and PhysicsDaughter, the Two Great Sillies who share (college) Football Mania! Thx!
Initial struggle followed by rapid completion once I grok-ed the theme, which led to .62 Mr. Connell.
I like Mr. Ancona's comment about offensive entries. I always make note of a clue or answer that I think I am likely to read about here. Like him, I saw none today. But tomorrow is another day.
I do wonder though if Wile E. Coyote, SUPER-genius, was an acceptable enough cultural reference for the superannuated, TV and movie shunning, "get off my lawn" types among us. :-)
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(Mine was 0.64 - I've been interested by the split today between "harder than usual" and "easy for Thursday" comments!)
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Can I ask what that fraction refers to?
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Jaa - it's how long it took in relation to our average solving time for the day of the week. For both of us, today was about 3/5 as quick as an average Thursday.
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I think of a TAUTOLOGY as something said/written over again repetitively.....(ha ha) not just the term itself. (Anyone else have Miss Paris for 8th grade English at Briarcliff HS?)......
And RECURSION as a kind of self-checking (if anyone else remembers Prolog).... not just an endless loop.....loop....loop
Excuse me; now I need to go chase my tail....
Additionally, the term "pleonasm" is there moreover, for when a thing is repeated in different words as well also.
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if you could reiterate that over again. . .
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It goes without saying...
hee hee
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I was hoping this puzzle would please all those who dislike the rebus or similar types of tricky themes, and it certainly seemed to. I found it much harder, so it took quite a bit of help. I finally got enough crosses to get A WILD GOOSE CHASE, which I loved and it obviously helped.
I was very impressed by the construction ( and nice to have Alex add his comment)
I do much better with a rebus puzzle, but am happy to have something different.
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58A + 17A = I think I'll clean the refridgerator instead.
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refrigerator
Ice box! ;-)
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icebox
A genuine workout that was barely bearable but after all, isn't that an endearing quality of 36a? I will not cry fowl, although I GROANED a lot while solving. I'm no SEER, but I did have a ball with the puzzle...Were these clues running deep or what? Unearthing all of the AMBIGUITY was RIVETing...Today's brain bending gem from rookie constructor Alex Eylar merits an admiring BRAVO; FACT! Welcome ABOARD the good-ship Wordplay, Alex...I will not burden youse guys with my laundry list of strike-overs. They eventually and mercilessly laid my grid to waste; to the victor go the FOILS...Printemps of '79 was when Supertramp had a major hit with "The Logical Song." It's a likable little ditty in any language; choose your's and sing along. The on screen lyrics provide three choices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYD_PfYD8qs
Thanks,
Bru
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The real takeaway for me is that the word 'set' covers 22 pages of the OED!
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I didn't get SET=? 22pages
One of the best puzzles I’ve seen—creative theme, and creative clueing!
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I really dislike entries that reference mindless tV shows that I have to Google. How about MSNBC hosts or PBS commentators or BBC dramas?
As for the logic, it was easy but I found it to be more of a conceit than profound concept. And opportunities were missed, e.g. One essential concept that should have been in is syllogism. Puzzle,theme wasan Idea not fully baked maybe?
Survivor is not mindless TV. The best players have brains and street smarts and social skills, and many of the challenges involve solving tricky puzzles on top of the physical aspect. I've been watching it since the first season, and it's constantly evolving in subtle ways. I was delighted to see Jeff Probst appear in the crossword.
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Well! Quote instead of SPACE and nail for HAIL led me to 36A.
Teleological and tautological. The later often used in organizations often as a rejection of the former.
And we all know ACME supplied the TNT.
Nice work Alex
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A gift to computer science folks.
Not just the logic, but that space in the quotes.
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A delicious, thoroughly amusing, Thursday puzzle, Thank you Alex Eylar.
The cluing is admirable, not just for the logical concepts but even for a good bit of the ITSY bitsy fill, e.g.SIN, THE, and the two final entries that left me grinning: LAP and PSST.
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@deb -- Loved your intro.
I found SO much to like in this puzzle. Tricky and witty cluing; genuine aha moments with getting SEER, HAIL, SAFARI, and THE. Some lovely answers: RIVET, BUM DEAL, COUNT ON IT, NIBLET. A magnificent tussle in the NE, where I went from BABBLE to RAMBLE, then back to BABBLE, and BAD DEAL to RAW DEAL to BUM DEAL (Hi, @Wags!). (And after looking it up, I'm still not sure what RECURSION means!) The sweet cross of PSST and MYST, and the snicker at TOOTS crossing EGESTS.
It felt different, it felt out of the box, as though it took me on a vacation to a new place. Come back soon, Alex!
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I did finish and it didn't take me an unusually long time, but my reaction was "Huh, that was weird" Had to read Deb's blog to get it and learned something along the way. That's why I do these puzzles.
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Congratulations Mr. Eylar! This took some work to complete but was well worth the effort.
BRAVO!
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Excellent Thursday, reasonable difficulty and entertaining -- including the color choices. Was going to inquire if it took intense negotiations to get in a duplicated word, but I see below that it's far from unprecedented. (The first occurrence was a bad place to have a wrong cross early. Sigh.)
Color choices? I print from A-Lite.....black and white.
For fun, type RECURSION into google.
4
LOL
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Good suggestion
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Hah!
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and Elke
Am glad that Alex continued submitting puzzles after the 13 rejected ones- it seems he does not suffer from triskaidekaphobia.
Lucky for us. While I GROANED at some of the names , after several LAPs I finally CHASEd down that WILD GOOSE.
Surprised that Jeff Chen did not give it the clue for 54A = ''POW'' or at least a BAM .('Best After Middle of the week)
Noticed two names in the news : ERIC and MARIO.
Off to quench my thirst.
2
Sometimes you just have to be sure your seat belt is securely fastened, knowing that turbulence lies ahead. And the theme really does go off the rails today, but for me it just enhances the ride. In the end fairly straightforward fill made it pretty easy to get the theme answers.
Thanks Alex, I really enjoy puzzles like this which present a novel challenge.
5
This was one of those grids that I looked at and initially thought that I would never get. What were these crazy clues?
I finally got a toehold in the NE with SPACE, CELLO, & ESSEN. somehow got enough crosses to get TAUTOLOGY at 58A. Finally started to come together. A steady solve, but not easy. Very fun and clever. Thanks. I loved the clue for HAIL! Well done!
2
I solved this puzzle without understanding the theme. Is that logical?
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Michele—Definitely. The closest I could come to identifying the theme was "weirdness." I solved it with no outside help but with several resorts to Mlle Check.
I usually find Thursday puzzles too tough to deal with and leave them unfinished if I attempt them at all, but for me today's puzzle was a breeze. The two TAUTOLOGYs got me started with the theme, which I found fun and refreshing. What does this say about me? I'm still struggling with last Sunday's puzzle.
3
Thus is the first time I've ever finished a Thursday puzzle (actually, anything after a Tuesday) without hints. And the theme was super fun!
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Congrats! I think Thursday is my second-worst day, after Saturday. They're just so tricky.
1
Behold the wheelhouse!
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Constructor here -- Hope this weird bit of logic runaround made for a fun solve.
Things learned in this process:
1) Will Shortz and his minions are very, very friendly.
2) The selection of acceptable words that begin with ‘O’ and end with ‘I’ are extremely limited, and required starting the puzzle from scratch to fit least-egregious “OMNI” in there.
3) The NYT has a high standard: 13 rejected puzzles, before this one was accepted.
24
PS - Stupid fun tidbit: go to Google, search “recursion”, and click on the "Did you mean..."
16
;)
Ha! Brilliant.
Count me out.
Clever and cute, but some rules are not meant to be broken. Like repeating an answer in a puzzle.
Like repeating an answer in a puzzle.
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This is the 49th published puzzle to include at least one repeated fill. Jeff Chen provided a link to the puzzles at xwordinfo.com.
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Felt that way at first, but an Acrostic may contain repeated words without ill effect.
It is unusual in a Crossword, but that one would not expect to encounter it here adds a novel touch.
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Followup thought - it is generally frowned on for a word or any part of a word to appear in a clue as well as in a fill (a "dupe"), but it is absolutely standard for a clue to be repeated once, twice, or more as a form of wordplay.
First I had RAW DEAL, then changed that to BAD DEAL in order to get EDIT for "Strike out." Never recovered. So didn't like this one. Too quirky.
Congratulations on your debut, Alex, now get lost.
Kidding.
6
Deb, there's a typo in your column: it's/its.
2
Thanks, eljay. I’ve fixed it in the column.
1
More likely an overzealous autocorrect.
enjoyed the puzzle tonight. I very often have "stress" dreams involving being unprepared -- no notes to teach a class or not knowing where the building is or being late. I'm hardly ever late. And in the dream I am actually nonchalant and quite "unstressed" -- go figure!
2
The voice major's stress dream: I'm attending someone's senior recital, only to discover when I get there that it's MY senior recital. I have to sing it all from memory, else I don't graduate. I've never heard of any of the music. Usually, I'm naked, or at least pants-less.
A more general student's stress dream: It's time for final exams, and I suddenly remember that I'm registered in a class (or several) that I've forgotten to attend all semester. I had this dream for years after I was out of school.
9
In graduate school during final exams, in the hush of the exam room, I was sometimes nearly overcome by a fear that I would suddenly burst out in an awful scream, horrifying those around me. This was not a dream but a real-life waking experience. It wasn't necessarily caused by the difficulty of the exam; it was more of a feeling that my situation—being a grad student—was unreal and wrong for me. Fortunately no scream never happened, but I bailed after one year, and was much happier for it.
2
I still have those dreams--the exam one and the pants-less one. I sometimes wonder why I look forward to getting into bad at the end of the day.
Hi guys I was wondering if anyone could explain to me what the deal is with the 40A clue "22+ pages of the Oxford English Dictionary"? Not sure what SET means in that context. Love to Learn and Grow
I believe it refers to the 22 pages of definitions and usages for "set" in the OED.
1
I take it to mean the word SET has so many definitions, it fills 22+ pages of the dictionary.
1
I think it mean that 22 pages of th OED are filled with definitions of the word SET.
2
I loved everything about this puzzle. Levine clues were hilarious, and there was not a wasted word in the fill. (Well maybe one). BRAVO!
2
COUNT ON IT, I love a good laugh, but the AMBIGUITY of those 'Levine clues' has me STYmied.
Is there a pARABLE?
2
Nice; tougher than usual imo. A rules question re: 14A. Shouldn’t the fill in be the same part of speech as the clue?
I'm curious on this one too. It's uncommon that I can't figure out how an answer satisfies the clue (with tense, etc), but this one has me stumped
Eh, I don't think it's a hard and fast rule. Looking at 8D, the issue is similar. Did you have a problem with that one?
1
Yeah, both 8d and 14a felt strange to me. Maybe because it’s a Thursday puzzle, the form mismatch qualifies as tricky cluing?
If the clues were “Mess” and “One clicks it,” for example, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
This is a very good puzzle for people who do not want to see rebuses or circles or tinted boxes on Thursday. I also did not notice any clues or entries to which people might take offense. I am glad that Deb has her pants on. Now if only the comments system would work.
4
P.S. I gather it is a debut. Nice one, Alex Eylar!
2
and Elke
Barry A.- Where do you see that Deb has her pants ON ? She says ''I am in possession of my pants ''. The pants could be in a drawer......
8
P.P.S. I'm also glad I got to do the puzzle in black and white.
Elke -- Deb and pants would make an interesting story, considering that possession is nine-tenths of the lore.
4
I thought the cluing was tough, and I was substantially slower than usual for a Thursday. But I did it! It helped once I gave in and decided to put TAUTOLOGY down twice; that freed me up to think outside the box and see what was going on. Other words seemed somewhat AMBIGUous--HAMS, ABOARD as examples--so I was just glad to come up with the solution.
I was curious why 1A highlights in yellow when I click on 36A, and why 25A (RECURSION) highlights in green when all the other theme answers highlight in blue. (I do the NYT online version of the puzzle on a Mac using Safari).
1A highlights for 36A because the puzzle doesn’t really know where to go: it’s being redirected to 66A... but since there is no 66A, the puzzle defaults back to 1A.
25A shows up green because it’s a mix of the blue and yellow highlight colors: blue (because that’s the clue you’re currently on), and yellow (because redirected clues show up yellow). So, it’s not a new special color; it’s just that the clue is referencing *itself*, so the blue and yellow combine into green.
7
25A doesn't quite show green on my Chrome on Windows 10, but it is very slightly greener - it's not t he same blue.
I think Alex's explanations is spot on. We've seen 1A highlighted when referencing an entry that doesn't really exist in a puzzle before, some time earlier this year.
One more comment now that I looked back at it, Liz B, 25A crosses 9D which is the browser you're using on a Mac. Hmmmm.....
1
I laughed all the way through this puzzle. Got done, showed my wife and she laughed too. Loved this puzzle.
6
I liked the puzzle concept and congratulate the constructor on this debut, but wish the clue for ambiguity had been something closer to ambiguous. For me, the ?? clue mostly recalled yesterday's testimony from the Attorney General.
7
A commenter elsewhere suggest the clue be something like "See 46" which would have been truly ambiguous -- 46A or 46D.
7
Precisely! That's a great suggestion, whoever came up with it.
I am particularly fascinated by ambiguity in language and by how even the most precise language can produce ambiguities. That's why I was uncomfortable with the clue confusing vagueness with ambiguity.
4
Oldtimers here may recall that I once said my favorite word was disambiguation. It would come in handy now.
2