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The instructions to the meta say you need to find the phrase that I’d hope you’d say in response to the question “Will you solve this meta?” You could start with YES I WILL as an initial guess since that’s a positive way to approach any puzzle, but let’s see how this one works. The first place to start is with the theme answers. You’ll notice that there are nine two-word theme answers where the first word is a number, proceeding from ONE to NINE.
- 21A: [Single pizza serving] is ONE SLICE.
- 23A: [Double-crosses] is TWO-TIMES.
- 29A: [With “The,” group in the 1944 short film “Gents Without Cents”] is THREE STOOGES.
- 50A: [Term meant to belittle a person with glasses] is FOUR-EYES.
- 64A: [Like intersections that may have heavier traffic than normal] is FIVE-WAY.
- 81A: [Green solids on pool tables] is SIX BALLS.
- 98A: [Bryn Mawr’s collegiate group] is SEVEN SISTERS. Little-known fact but when you write crosswords and marry a Bryn Mawr alumna as I did, you’re contractually obligated to mention her alma mater in your puzzle at least every once in a while.
- 107A: [Like the graphics of the original “Legend of Zelda”] is EIGHT-BIT. It’s pretty amazing how “The Legend of Zelda” took off and became such a celebrated series of games considering just how hard the original game was. I spent many, many hours in my childhood trying and failing to make it through the entire game but could never do it. I only beat it right before I went to college, just when Nintendo emulators were being released on the internet. By then I had much greater access to strategies and walk-through guides if I got stuck and I could use save-states to save the game at whichever point I wanted, which made it much easier to make progress than in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But enough video-game-related nostalgia for now; let’s move on.
- 112A: [Like a round of golf that features half of the course] is NINE-HOLE.
Thinking about the puzzle title, it’s easy to see the numerical order of one through nine from these theme answers, but what do we do with them? Numbers is a pretty broad category that might lead you to several ideas. You might think to look at the squares in the grid with those numbers, but C-U-T-B-R-O-S-L-E only produces gibberish. Another idea might be to look at the theme entries themselves and take the letter corresponding with that number, so the first letter of the theme answer with ONE, the second letter of the theme answer with TWO, and so on. Unfortunately, that also produces a gibberish string of O-W-R-R-W-L-I-T, and there’s no ninth letter in NINE-HOLE.
What you have to do is think more about the second word in each theme answer. Why pick ONE SLICE from all the possibilities instead of something like ONE-SIDED or ONE-LINER? Why TWO-TIMES and not TWO-DIMENSIONAL or TWO-SEATER? It may help if you think of the theme entries as forming a list: 1. SLICE, 2. TIMES, 3. STOOGES, etc. It turns out that there are other answers in the grid that act as synonyms of those second words, and their clues correspond with those second words as well. In fact, there’s a helpful one right at the first Across answer:
- 1. SLICE could be clued as 1A: [Divide with a knife]. That answer is CUT.
- 2. TIMES could be clued as 6D: [Instances] which is OCCASIONS.
- 3. STOOGES could be clued as 14D: [Flunkies] which is UNDERLINGS.
- 4. EYES could be clued as 53A: [Gets a glimpse of] which is NOTICES.
- 5. WAY could be clued as 66D: [Path] which is TRAIL.
- 6. BALLS could be clued as 79A: [Spherical objects] which is ORBS.
- 7. SISTERS could be clued as 85A: [Convent members] which is NUNS.
- 8. BIT could be clued as 118A: [Small amount] which is IOTA.
- 9. HOLE could be clued as 121A: [Something dug in the ground] which is TRENCH.
Take the first letters of those corresponding grid entries (either in thematic order or in grid order), and when you’re asked the question “Will you solve this meta?” you respond with COUNT ON IT.
This meta came to be in a strange way. Last week I had the answer STOOGE, which I clued as [Curly of slapstick, e.g.], but the clue I’d originally sent to my testers was much trickier than that, so it felt out of place in a puzzle that didn’t have an especially complicated theme. I won’t spoil that clue just in case I have a chance to drop it in a future puzzle, but nonetheless, the idea of Three Stooges got me thinking about how to use numeric phrases for a meta.
I should also mention that one of my test-solvers brought to my attention an unintended snag even if you landed on the right idea. The EYES of FOUR-EYES could plausibly be matched with ORBS (79D: Spherical objects). That would be a strange clue for EYES, but [Eyes, poetically] has been a common angle for previous clues for ORBS, so it’s not out of the question that you’d match those two words together. I kept a close watch to avoid words like TAD which would be very easy to erroneously match with the BIT of EIGHT-BIT, but the connection between EYES and ORBS slipped by my … eye. The good news is that you do need ORBS for the meta as well, just not for matching with EYES. So hopefully, if you got the aha moment to look for synonyms of the theme answers’ second words elsewhere in the grid, then you’d be able to sort out that issue without too many problems.
Just one other clue of note: 15D: [Place that Carl Sagan called “a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears”] is MARS. I mention this only because I had another Sagan quote in a clue in last week’s puzzle. Sagan really was a treasure trove of great quotes, wasn’t he? It’s hard for me to imagine off the top of my head a more concise, evocative description of Mars than that.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/08/20/solution-evan-birnholzs-aug-20-crossword-thats-an-order/