Get Out of Here! - The New York Times

Wait, no, not yet — come do this Tony Orbach Sunday special.

SUNDAY PUZZLE — I defy anyone to not try to come up with examples of this theme for the rest of the day, once they’ve gotten to the bottom of this nifty grid by Tony Orbach, who has been a master of Sunday Times crosswords since 2006. It’s as natural as going out to breathe fresh air.

On a personal note, Mr. Orbach turns 59 on Dec. 6! If you see him, wish him well (and get your puzzle autographed — have him sign The Times). He’s a saxophone-playing construction-project manager who got his love of crosswords from his father, who happens to be Jerry Orbach from “Law and Order” (among myriad other productions on the stage and on the screen). Both Orbachs have constructed. One time they swapped Puns and Anagrams puzzles, according to the print notes for today’s grid.

Tricky Clues

Must be all the sax-playing, because Mr. Orbach tosses in a lot of really fun musical references in this puzzle, starting with 1-Across, JAM SESH, which is a debut (although “jam session” has been in the puzzle many times, if you were wondering). The northwest corner has a lot of appeal, actually — I also loved A LOT crossing A LITTLE.

The opposite corner, southeast, went very slowly for me, with stubborn points at MR CUB and TEXAN, and “tags” instead of PEGS.

36A: I was only faintly acquainted with this pianist, Geri ALLEN, although she built an enormous legacy. A little bit of confusion with LEKS running down, since “laks” sounds possible.

70A: Ah, the ol’ tittle-tattle, the words of a chatterbox, a magpie, a blabbermouth — GOSSIP. “Bavardage” is French, “Clishmaclaver” Scottish. If you happen to be familiar with the “Chambers Crossword Dictionary,” its editors had a word-loving blog that went by the name “Clishmaclaver,” although it looks to have run fallow. So have the water coolers and the coffee stations in many offices this year! The cool people have managed to keep gossiping remotely, but I sit at home and make up juicy subplots for my dogs.

104A: We see this location pretty frequently, but without “Adriatic” in the clue, I just don’t think of ISTRIA (and AYS, running down from that last letter, is confusing — I figured it had to be “oys.”)

59D: “Hair do” in a clue would give DORAG away, but “pattern” is really hard to parse. According to The Times, those of us who spell it DORAG don’t know what it does anyway (although that story, which shows intricate “spinning” waves, explains why “patterns” is correct).

87D: A couple of mid misdirects in the downs here: I was trying to come up with something you could ride instead of climb here, at Mt. ARARAT. I should have stayed with geography at 91D, where I tried to think of a Middle Eastern term for a season instead of an OASIS.

Today’s Theme

I dearly love idioms, and themes like this that tweak them and make us look differently at phrases we usually throw around blithely. Vernacular is a really fun part of language, especially when it comes to explaining what a “fine kettle of fish” or “raining cats and dogs” means to someone new to English (in Lithuania, apparently, that expression is “it’s raining axes”). I think all but one of the base expressions in the nine theme entries are idiomatic.

This is a fairly simple-to-explain letter removal theme, a little reminiscent of a couple of other Sunday puzzles this year (I remember “Final Offer” from September, and I know there are more). In this case, you’re removing a whole word — the little (important) preposition “of” — to change a phrase’s meaning to solve for a punny clue. If you read today’s title in that light, “Get Out of Here!” you’ll see what Mr. Orbach means. Those clues, however, are really clever and can be tricky!

33-Across is an accessible example to start with; for me, the thought process here was what made the pieces click together. A “swim-team guru” sounds like a coach, maybe a master, of something swimmers do — how about a “master of strokes,” as in back, breast and side strokes? Good thinking, but “stroke” goes first — “stroke of genius” becomes STROKE GENIUS, a water sports wizard.

106-Across is another example where I found the double meaning quirky. An “art-shop worker’s manual” looked like some kind of reference (book), given a few crosses: It’s a FRAME REFERENCE (this exists, by the way, if you need a winter project).

The only straightforward expression that gets this treatment is at 40-Across, with a whimsical clue. “Hire Phil Collins’s longtime band for a gig?” becomes BOOK GENESIS, a play on part of the Bible.

Also one of my favorites? The biggest center entry. It seems very apropos at the end of a year that saw home entertainment take over a whole lobe of brain activity, speaking for myself. Everyone who can recite Netflix’s entire library at this point in 2020, without pausing to think about it, has STREAM CONSCIOUSNESS.

Constructor Notes

I had made a puzzle years ago where the theme consisted of phrases in the form of “___ OF ___,” but with the first and last words swapped: one was PARIS OF PLASTER. I remembered that theme recently and noticed that removing the connecting “OF” in some of the base phrases made for a whole new range of meaning changes.

As you can imagine, this is quite a fungible theme — I’m pretty sure there are about a million “___ OF ___” phrases — so, in an effort to winnow down the pile, at first I tried to make them all have some other thing in common, and I wound up with a group of phrases related to woodworking. A few examples were BOARDEDUCATION and TABLECONTENTS. I submitted that puzzle first, but a few of the theme entries did not feel quite right to Will — however, the overall idea was acceptable enough to merit a rework, so the published puzzle was actually the second crack at it, and FRAMEREFERENCE was the lone holdover from the woodworking version.

One thing I enjoyed in particular about this version was that the longest entry was one that wouldn’t have worked the same way before the age of Netflix and the like. It’s always nice to have an opportunity to use a relatively new sense of a word, and sometimes that can be the thing that makes an old theme finally come together. The moral is, don’t throw out those partial theme ideas!

Thanks again to Will, Sam and the rest of the gang for all of their input.

And, a bit of the sausage-making details for the Wordplay faithful. At 84D, I left myself R?R, which, to me, does not have a great option for a fill word (though I wouldn’t mind seeing RJR Nabisco … maybe I’m alone in that sentiment?). I had fooled around with several versions and submitted RNR [G.I. time off, familiarly]. It turns out this had been used by The NYT only once, and the team preferred RUR, so that’s what we went with.

Last thing — I liked finding the crossing of JAMSESH/MINDBLOWN and enabling the kind of Bill & Ted vibe that it lends to the opening corner. “Dude!”

Sea confusion?

Subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.

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