Brambles with edible purple fruit / THU 12-16-21 / South American arboreal snake / Setting for Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"

Constructor: Trenton Charlson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: BOGGLE (52A: Flummox ... or a classic word game represented by the central grid of shaded squares, in which 15-, 17- and 55-Across can be found) — 4x4 section of letters at center of grid represents a BOGGLE rack, and you can "find" the theme answers (all synonyms for "BOGGLE") in it simply by playing the rack the way you would in an actual game of BOGGLE, i.e. by connecting adjacent letters, like such:

BEWILDER (15A: Flummox)

BEMUSE (17A: Flummox)

BEFUDDLE (55A: Flummox)

Word of the Day: DEWBERRIES (36A: Brambles with edible purple fruit) —

The dewberries are a group of species in the genus Rubus, section Rubus, closely related to the blackberries. They are small trailing (rather than upright or high-arching) brambles with aggregate fruits, reminiscent of the raspberry, but are usually purple to black instead of red.

Dewberries are common throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere and are thought of as a beneficial weed. The leaves can be used to make a herbal tea, and the berries are edible and taste sweet. They can be eaten raw, or used to make cobbler, jam, or pie. Alternatively, they are sometimes referred to as ground berries. (wikipedia)

I enjoy BOGGLE. I used to play with my friend Kathy a lot, back in the Later Grad School years, when I would do anything, literally anything, not to be writing my dissertation (see my 2700-book vintage paperback collection, for instance). Kathy and I also played the Charlie's Angels board game, but that's another story. When Kathy got a job and moved away from Ann Arbor, we would play BOGGLEover email*—shake out a grid, send a representation of it to the other person, then set the timer and send our answers to each other when the time runs out. I'd forgotten we did this until this very moment. The early internet was Great. If I played BOGGLE online today, there'd just be some app that was mining my computer or phone for data it could sell to Facebook or something . . . Anyway, the point is I like BOGGLE. I also like crosswords. I don't (it turns out) so much like BOGGLE in my crosswords. This is a classic example of a "look at my architectural feat!" puzzle that doesn't really hold any actual *solving* interest for the solver. I don't want to play a game after I'm done solving. Again, the puzzle is not a child's placemat. It is a sacred space where cool *crossword* things happen. The grid has a ton of visual interest, i.e. it's got that grid, and all the longer answers running through it. But the answers themselves aren't that interesting—two of them (SNAFUED, DEWBERRIES) basically scream "I Have A Giant Wordlist In My Constructing Software" (see also TREEBOA). They're not cool words, they're either f'd up versions of words (SNAFUED?) or compound words made out of words you know even if the results are not (in my case) words you know. The rest of the grid is just flat. Little heavier on gunk (ABOU, EENY, ASSTDA, GSU, OBE, etc.) than I'd like, but essentially inoffensive. The main point is that conceptually, this is interesting, but as a solver, it was mostly irksome. Solving basically just involves building a platform on which I'm supposed to play an entirely different game that I have no interest in playing, and anyway it's less that you "play" it than that you look at it and go "huh, yeah, look at that." Total dissociation between conceptual complexity and solver enjoyment.