68. Give Me Five!

PDF / PUZ

Hello hello! Where has August gone? We had a triple-digit heat index this past week for a couple of days, so I'm ready for cooler fall temperatures (sure, I say that now). My Cubbies are also in the wild card race, but those pesky Brewers are preventing us from taking the division. We're still going to try!

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1. Puzzle #67 answer: CUTTING-EDGE

Correct entries: 49 (a Week 3 or Week 3.5; I'd estimate about 25 of these were solo solves.)

Explanation, a little longer than usual this time: My intent when you solved this was that there'd be a lot of odd stuff going on, especially for a smaller grid:

1. We've broken some cardinal rules of standard crosswords: a bunch of two 2-letter words appear...

2. ...and we have repeated entries (OLE) at 9-Down and 13-Across (1-Across and 6-Down also rival that).

3. Though symmetrical, the grid is an odd 12-by-12 and, perhaps most notably,

4. Some of the fill is atrocious, especially for a grid that looks very simple to fill (ORNE, ADUE, CRU, ARUMS, LOR, TRO). I mean, consider those simple corners of 3-by-3 fill: there wasn't a way to do that without repeating words in NE? Or avoiding brutal fill in SW and SE?

5. Well, there were a lot more constraints here than meet the eye. To make some (not all, some!) of the fill more palatable, to avoid the OLE dupes, and to get rid of the 2-by-2 entries, per the title, let's surround the entire grid, making the puzzle 14-by-14 (still weird).

6. But what would surround it making relatively valid crossword entries? You had to play around with this, and I almost considered cluing BREATH with something "noun whose verb is formed by adding an 'E' to the end." With some trial-and-error, you had to realize (fittingly) that the word at the outer limits (per the title) was simply the word EDGE, repeated over and over.

7. You are told the answer is an 11-letter adjective, and the most fitting one that describes the fact that I've cut out all the EDGEs from the grid is CUTTING-EDGE, the answer to the meta. I think some looked askance at this being hyphenated without being told that explicitly, and I can see that; I probably would've have included that distinction in retrospect.

Thanks to Gridmaster T for the graphic! About 10 or 15 puzzles or so, I try to push the boundaries of construction if I can, and I think this one qualifies! Thanks, as always, for solving!

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2. Leaderboard (I know I'm behind, haha. I'll try to get this updated this week!)

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3. This is the fourth Saturday in August, and this is definitely a Level 4, at least, I'd say. We also have another odd grid size this time, and I would've loved this one to fit in a normal 15-by-15, say, but it was not to be. Since it can be a bit of a red herring, I will freely tell you that the grid size was just the first one I tried (after about 7 or 8 failed attempts) to get what I needed.

The PDF also has the clues repeated in a larger font size on the second page; this is not meta-related, but they were just smaller than I would've liked on the first page.

Good luck, and may all your solves be beautiful!

Mikey G

The answer to the meta is a 5-letter word.