Involved in Monkey Business

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Wordplay

By Deb Amlen

FRIDAY PUZZLE — I’m going to go out on a limb today — we have actual trees growing here in the newsroom [Fake. Watch your step. — Ed.] [It’s not fake. Where do you think the newsprint comes from? — D. A.] — and predict that there will be a fairly even split in how people feel about Damon Gulczynski’s crossword.

I loved it, and there will be other people who loved it, but there will also be those who believe that there are too many proper nouns, too many neologisms, too much of a reliance on pop culture. There will be people who feel badly that there weren’t more Zs (Can you believe that there were only four of them?). There will be people who believe there were too many Zs (Did I mention that he managed to cram four of them in there?).

My point is, there will never be a puzzle that makes 100 percent of the solving population happy. It’s a lesson that has taken me a frustratingly long time to learn, but the editors understand it. That’s why for every whippersnapper-ish FOMO (29D) — an early 21st century acronym meaning the “Fear of Missing Out” — or ‘TUDE (41A), there’s a 1970s NANU NANU (48A) and a 1950s “For ESMÉ — With Love and Squalor” (12D). Balance is tricky to achieve, but it’s there for a reason. It’s there so everyone has a chance of making headway in the puzzle. And it’s not a science, so sometimes there will be more of one than the other.

But there is a lot of great stuff in Mr. Gulczynski’s grid: HAYMAKER, PIZZERIA, ‘TUDE, VORACITY, OLD NAVY, I LOVE L.A., FRANZ FERDINAND, TUMMIES, ZOOKEEPER, CHARM OFFENSIVE, HA HA FUNNY, FOMO and ZEN GARDEN. Even if you’ve never heard of a CHARM OFFENSIVE, you know it now, and isn’t it a great phrase? When you’re trying to distinguish, say, between things that are strange and things that are truly funny, you can now describe the latter as “HA HA FUNNY.” And that is infinitely useful.

■ 11A: Tricky! The British spell the word “realize” with an S, as in “realise,” unlike us Yanks. But because it’s Friday and because the “Brits” are in the clue, the answer is the British was of saying Z, or ZED.

■ 20A: Wordplay alert! “Strong connection?” suggests personal chemistry or even a particularly good cellphone connection, but it has to do with boxing. I had to look this one up, but a HAYMAKER is a punch that is meant to knock out one’s opponent.

■ 21A: You know where “Do the Right Thing” took place? Brooklyn, that’s where, which just happens to have the same number of letters as the answer PIZZERIA, not that I’m bitter.

■ 57A: Ha-ha, yes, we all know that BIKINIS provide limited coverage. So, in fact, does the mankini. I look forward to seeing that in a puzzle. For balance, mind you, and for no other reason.

■ 61A: Ironically, the only spoken word in Mel Brooks’s “Silent Movie” was “NON,” spoken by the mime Marcel Marceau.

■ 4D: FRANZ FERDINAND was very interesting to write in down the grid, and I wonder if it was some sort of Easter egg. Almost exactly 103 years ago, the archduke, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife were assassinated and the killing is thought to have triggered World War I. I’ve pulled the 1914 article from The New York Times machine, and you can see it here.

■ 5D: I’ve always called it a fez, but TIL that the tarboosh is the hat worn by Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean region. And it can have a TASSEL.

■ 28D: Cute clue. Note that the TAP in “Where Molson Coors is TAP” is in all capital letters, so it’s not likely to refer to a beer tap. Today, it’s the New York Stock Exchange, or N.Y.S.E.

■ 37D: Believe it or not, TEEN Vogue has been doing some terrific explainers on news that is relevant. They’re not solely about nail polish. Way to go, TEEN Vogue.

■ 44D: Here’s the thing about SLIVERing, if you’re on a diet. It’s very easy to “SLIVER” your way around an entire cake if you don’t have a lot of willpower. Not that I would know.

Pretty typical Friday fare with a pretty typical backstory. I put in a couple of long seed entries (CHARM OFFENSIVE and FRANZ FERDINAND) and went from there. I was happy to find HA-HA FUNNY (making its debut), and I was relieved to find Lindsey VONN — she saved me in the SW corner.

I’m also glad my clue for HANOI survived. When I first learned about recursive algorithms, The Tower of Hanoi was the example problem, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. After seeing it, I wrote a computer program to solve it and kicked it off with 100 discs, wondering how long it would take. It ran for four days straight on my parents’ Power Mac before I killed it. I later learned that if I would have only waited like 600 billion more days I would have seen it finish.

Your thoughts?

An earlier version of this article stated that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand took place 203 years ago. It took place 103 years ago, in 1914, and Deb got it wrong because math.

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