Early settler of Nova Scotia / TUE 4-9-19 / Ice dancing gold medalist Virtue

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Challenging (absurd to run this on Tuesday) (5:55)


THEME: there's a "Note"! What fun ... :( 

Theme answers:

• all the Acrosses, I guess

Word of the Day: EPT (60D: Competent, jocularly) —

Oxford credits the New Yorker writer E. B. White with the first recorded use of “ept.” In a letter dated October 1938, he said, “I am much obliged … to you for your warm, courteous, and ept treatment of a rather weak, skinny subject.”

The dictionary says “ept” means adroit, appropriate, or effective. It describes the word as a back-formation and “deliberate antonym” of “inept.” A back-formation is a word formed by dropping part of an earlier word.

Although the OED doesn’t have entries for “ane” or “ert,” it does include them (as humorous antonyms for “inane” and “inert”) in its entry for “ept.”

Here’s the citation, from the Sept. 7, 1966, issue of Time magazine: “With the exception of one or two semantic twisters, I think it is a first-rate job—definitely ept, ane and ert.” (grammarphobia.com)

Pointless nonsense (a) that had no business appearing on a Tuesday (b). The NYT continues to cannibalize itself, ripping off older puzzle themes that it ran years ago. This one is a bad imitation of a puzzle that I also didn't enjoy, but that had a point—Joe Krozel did this play on a crossword's conventional rotational symmetry by having the Across answers in the grid actually be rotationally symmetrical as well. So, e.g. when LAMINA appeared in the E (which it did, memorably), ANIMAL appeared in the W. Instead of the solver's having to guess, with no clues and no rationale, which of each Across clue's two answers goes forward and which backward, Krozel's puzzle had internal logic for the "backward," and none of this split-clue stuff.  Here's that grid:


See the rotational symmetry! Unlike today's, with its bone-stupid "Note," which ... kind of ruins the whole "gimmick." What kind of puzzle just tells you its premise right off the bat???

So the NYT plagiarizes itself, badly, producing a degraded, pointless version of a show-offy puzzle that was never that pleasant to solve in the first place. Amazing.

Let's see, anything worth talking about?  ... Well, there's DIALLED, ugh (44D: Phoned, to Brits). And ACADIAN—fine word, not a Tuesday word, though (42D: Early settler of Nova Scotia). Most of the difficulty came from just flailing around with the Acrosses. I wrote in IDO for CIO (9D: Union letters), and had ATIME before ATIDE (2D: "There is ___ in the affairs of men ...": Shak.). Every other error involved writing in the backward forward or the forward backward. This is like one of Dr. Frankenstein's failed early attempts. It needs so much work. It needs a title / revealer, for one. And then it needs to run on Thursday, for two. There is No Rationale for the Across clues. Randomness is not a rationale! I have no idea how hard this was to make, but I know how horrible it was to solve. If you do not consider solver experience when constructing your look-at-me! puzzles, please start. Please. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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