Refuse Refuse!
After some debate, we decided to introduce a “meta-clue” into this week’s acrostic by using “AUGUST” as both CLUE E and CLUE K. Although the two clues are spelled alike, they are pronounced differently and mean different things. “August,” in short, is a heteronym, and so these matching clues also served as a hint to the puzzle’s theme.
This acrostic may not have been one of the harder ones for our dear solvers to solve – please let us know, as we are never really sure about that – but it was almost certainly the hardest one for your friendly constructors to construct.
The inspiration for this puzzle began with a recent visit to Planet Word, a museum in DC “where language comes to life.” For reasons that are difficult to explain, we came up with the notion to create a puzzle using the theme of heteronyms, with the aim of having every clue/answer pair contain a heteronym. Challenge Number One: There just are not that many pithy quotes to be found on the subject. Challenge Number Two: There just are not that many heteronyms kicking around.
These days, however, one can find most anything online, including Jonathan Becher’s webpage that offers both a concise definition of “heteronym” and a variety of fun examples, yielding a quote that fit the NYT metrics for an acrostic. We also found an exhaustive list of heteronyms in Wikipedia – check it out, if you’re curious.
We believe that we managed to go “25 for 25” in the sense of placing a heteronym in every clue/answer pair. OK, at least one is a stretch. CLUE D (“Followed, allied oneself to”) is admittedly a clunky formulation. And while “allied” the verb and “allied” the adjective are pronounced differently and mean slightly different things, that difference in meaning is quite slight indeed, though perhaps less so if one were to capitalize the A (“Allied”).
Kudos to those of you who spotted all the other (true) heteronyms. And kudos to those who struggle with heteronyms while learning our beloved language:
This acrostic’s subject subjected me to a buffet of clues that buffeted my brain with content that ultimately made me content!
Beautifully done and great fun!
Very nice Acrostic.
In the early ’80s, the City endeavored to remove all gender references from the numerous civil service titles in their classification system, which I dubbed the Capon Decision. My personal favorite was the substitute for Seamstress.
That was such a blast!
To answer to your question about the perceived difficulty of the puzzle, when I first looked at it, I thought it would be nasty, because I saw only two gimmes (laminate and kaddish). Then I tipped my coffee mug (is that cheating? It’s kinda consulting an outside source), and noted the ovalish shape and, aha, “ellipse“ came right to mind. (And a revelation to me that this shape could be rigorously defined mathematically.)
After that, the rest fell fairly easily. Overall, I would say the difficulty level was, just like the rest of the puzzle, a delight.
When I had finished, I did note a bunch of heteronyms scattered in the clues and answers. But I didn’t realize, until I read your commentary, that every single one of the 25 clue/answer combos contained a heteronym! Wow. That must have truly been a chore to have done that, and to have concealed it so deftly.
Here’s what I picked up:
Batter, conflict, close, allied, August, refuse, laminate, lead, row, proceeds, august (again, lower case), wind, address, appropriate, confines, ellipses, subject, tears, content, entrance, intimate, incense, records, covert, and axes.
Such fun! My only regret is that we get to see the acrostic only every other week.
I finished in 45 minutes, a personal best! And I learned a new word: heteronym! However (stand back for quibble): Is “batter” a heterodyne? If I beat you up for ruining the cake, do I batter you for spoiling the batter?
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your comment, and congrats on a personal best!
The heteronym in Clue/Answer A was actually the answer, buffet, rather than batter.
Dave and Jane
My bad for misleading Matt. I saw it was buffet, but just dictated batter too quickly.
This week I gave up my broken Mac for an iPad so I’m thrilled that it’s still easy for me to do the acrostic.
While I vaguely understood the theme early on my minute attention span did not spur me to heteronymic content even after I noted the reference to the Polish man. (I once heard of a car wash that got in trouble when they placed a want ad with that word capitalized…) So I struggled a bit, bounced back and forth on a few words, so you could say it was a buffet in all its heteronymic glory!
Started slowly and when I got CONTENT, it finally hit me that it was about one of those
“-nyms” when the meanings are different but the spelling is the same. Then I just kept laughing 🤣 to the finish.
To me it was worth the hard work you put in to construct — if not the easiest it was as entertaining as any I can remember. Thanks1
I found this one hard to start, but once I saw that the first word of the quote was HETERONYMS, the whole first sentence came into focus and my solve proceeded apace. On balance it was a baby bear solve for me: not too hard, not too easy, just right. Wonderful construction and very enjoyable.
Thanks for the shoutout!
It made me content that you referred to my content.
How about ones based on homophones too?
https://jonathanbecher.com/2016/05/08/sounds-wrong-10-sentences-homophones/
So cool that the author actually weighs in! (Not the first time. But probably unlikely next time they put up a quote from Shakespeare or Dickens. 😬)
It was not one of your most challenging puzzles to solve for my wordy little brain — but still plenty challenging and lots of fun! I loved the video above. A main reason that English is one of the hardest languages to learn is that it is one of the least inflected languages in the world. So instead of conveying meaning through tense, declension, syntax, etc., we English speakers convey meaning via myriad idioms — prepositional phrases (get UP; I’m feeling UP today; don’t put UP with that) … as well as heteronyms, etc.
I can see how this puzzle would have been extra challenging to construct. Well done as always!
The clue that hung me up the longest was “made rough by heavy wind” — my mind was fixated on objects: “chafed”? “pitted”? But the cardinal rule of puzzling is of course to think out of your own box, and I finally crawled out of mine and realized you were talking about a boat on water. I loved the double clues of E and U.
Do rest up if you need to, but I’ll be happy to tackle one like this again anytime!