Onetime lover of Riker on Star Trek TNG / THU 7-2-15 / Father of Erebus Nyx in Greek myth / Soba alternative / James Merritt pioneering lithographer / Protein constituent informally / Depression common during childhood

Constructor: Timothy Polin

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (only because of one corner; otherwise Easy-Medium)


THEME: INVISIBLE INK (67A: What six of this puzzle's clues have been written with?) — theme clues are single letters, to which you must add "-INK" to get the full clue; ERGO:

Theme answers:

• ECCENTRICITY (18A: K) [i.e. Kink]
• FOUNDER (12D: S) [i.e. Sink]
• SPLIT SECOND (30A: W) [i.e. Wink]
• MEDIUM RARE (38A: P) [i.e. Pink]
• STOOL PIGEON (53A: F) [i.e. Fink]
• CONNECT (45D: L) [i.e. Link]

Word of the Day: ETYMA (11D: Root words) —

noun

plural noun: etyma

1. a word or morpheme from which a later word is derived. (google)

This concept is nice. Grid is oversized (16 wide) and still crammed to the gills with theme material. Perhaps too crammed—fill gets pretty strained at times. But core concept is solid and clever. Two things were weird for me about this solving experience. First, I took a ridiculous, circuitous route through the grid at the beginning, getting real traction nowhere, but somehow managing to proceed by crosses until I'd nearly traversed the whole grid. Second, I got stuck in one of the narrow-exit corners. Can you guess which one? Hint: the SW. It's the SW. I got stuck there. Those corners were much tougher than the rest of the puzzle. Corners that are mostly cut off and barely accessible can get very dicey. Since I moved into the NE from the front ends of some Across answers, I was able to get that corner under control without too much trouble. But backing my way into the SW proved much, much tougher. But let's start with that weird opening:

Look at that nonsense. I'm all over hell and gone. It's not like I didn't *try* to dig into various sections as I moved through them. It's just that I got thwarted, and so kept moving. You can see what thwarted me up top—two wrong answers (PAL for MAC, STEMS for (yuck) ETYMA). Anyway, the meandering you see above is decidedly not normal. But it had this weird, serendipitous upside, which is that the SE was the first corner I really nailed, and that just happened to be the corner that held the key to the whole theme. Thus, very shortly after the CHAOS you see above, I had this:

I was not yet aware that there were two more theme clues lurking in the tinier corners. Anyway, getting the theme revealer opened things right up. And not much later I tried to enter the SW. And failed. Well, mostly failed. I got UH OH and GANG WAR (though I was unsure of the latter). But even with -US ending I couldn't remember GENUS (haven't played Trivial Pursuit in a quarter century). Clues for both MUGGING (43D: Slice of ham?) and I HEAR YA (44D: "Tell me about it!") were opaque. Didn't know who DeWitt Clinton was, so NYC stayed hidden. Got IRE, but it didn't help. Know far, far too many 3-letter synonyms for [Roscoe] (most notably ROD and GUN), so GAT wasn't obvious. It took, finally, just guessing MIC at 43A: Word after open or hot to move things along. Thought I was done, but I'd left a square blank back at IVES / SLIT. So that's where I finished.


Did anyone else have GO UNDER for [S[ink]] at first?
Did anyone expect something much, much more interesting than ECCENTRICITY for [K[ink]]?
No? OK. That's fine.

Good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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