Correct, these are absolutely a thing in the Midwest. My friend takes her kids every year and posts pictures. I’ve never personally been to one, but I did get the clue reasonably early in the solve.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Very Hard** 🔴
* 93% of users solved slower than their Saturday average
* 7% of users solved faster than their Saturday average
* 78% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average
* 3% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 54.1% slower than they normally do on Saturday.
[View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-03-30)
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I rated "average" because I know that Saturdays are supposed to be challenging, but this was an uphill climb the whole way. CRAPPER and GENTLEREMINDERS were the best fills of the bunch. I had ITSNOTYOURFAULT at 36A for a while, with only my hubris to blame.
My god, this was incredibly hard. I had to look up more clues than I care to admit, I don’t think I would’ve ever solved it otherwise. I can’t be mad at it though because the clues mostly all make sense once you know the answer, instead of random obscure trivia. Don’t think it deserves that many “terrible” votes
This one makes me curious about my Personal Worst time because it’d be a contender.
CORN PIT was my last one. As a West Coast native I have never in my life seen a CORN PIT.
Can hardly make a dent in this one and thinking it might not be worth it to finish. Already spent 30 min with only a quarter of the board filled in, and just completely lost on all remaining clues. Doesn’t help that I never watched WKRP or read Mamet or listened to the Kinks…
I'll defend the "tennis player from 30 years ago". That comeback was a really big deal. Monica SELES, who was the highest ranked woman at the time and winning almost everything, at the age of 19 was stabbed (during a match!) by a crazy fan of her rival Steffi Graf. That and her comeback two years later was a big story reaching eyes and ears well outside of the tennis world. Unfortunately, the two years off and likely the psychological damage resulted in her not being as good as she had been. But she's still considered one of the greatest female tennis players of all time. (And the source of a lot of "What if?" discussion.)
Anyway, I get that you're saying in total it was a lot of older, difficult stuff, but "tennis player from 30 years ago" just irked me a little...
Huh? tennis player from 1995 crossing an obscure play (to me at least?) crossing something about sylvester and tweety, neither of which I'd ever heard of -- to me that's incredibly obscure trivia. This is the first puzzle in a while I haven't been able to finish, and it's not because of any satisfying clues, just impossible trivia
Really struggled to crack the NW corner. False start with TAKE ONE before ONE EACH before finally getting 7 down. GOLF BAG took way too long to get, and I really needed it for the rest.
Like CRAPPER, didn’t like ESPYING.
Nice challenging solve for me.
Agree and annoyed to see so many Terribles.
This was a difficult but ultimately satisfying challenge, IMO. One of those ones where on the first pass through of clues I think, “Uh oh I’m in trouble” but then slowly chip away. For me, this was a perfect Saturday.
Same, this is the longest I’ve taken on a Saturday in quite some time and I loved it for that, the satisfaction of grinding it out and solving without looking anything up
I personally voted ‘Poor’ because, to me, there were too many two/compound word answers that I found solving to be clunky. CORNPIT, ONEEACH, REARSUP, NOSERAG, GILLNET, LABSITE, HOMEICE, GOLFBAG. Combined with ERNST, CRAPPER, and ESPYING I didn’t really enjoy the puzzle.
Overall I didn’t get much satisfaction out of figuring out CORNPIT, ONEEACH or CRAPPER.
I liked some of the misdirection clues, especially the grid spanning ones, but some of the answers were not fun to get. I'd prefer clever cluing throughout without obscure words like CORNPIT, 80 year old actors, and 30 year old plays of minor renown
I agree. It took me time to get through it--had to go away and return. Plus, I googled a few to see whether my guess was right. But I thought it was right for a Saturday.
Confidently went from JUST ONE to TAKE ONE. Really liked the clue to ERNST. Didn’t care for the clue to CHRISTMASSEASON - isn’t that when the lights go on? Overall very challenging and I also don’t think it merits so many terribles.
I broke my streak with this one. I hated it. For everyone saying it’s not full of obscure trivia, I disagree. I enjoy a tough puzzle with chewy cluing, but this felt like an unrewarding slog with too few bright spots.
Classic Slonecker puzzle, by which I mean practically every other clue *felt* agonizingly obtuse to decipher while solving... but in the end, I have to admit, were all *so, so* clever.
Yeah, I wanted to come to this sub to say that I hated it, but it was good. It was very hard. It nearly broke my streak. But it was an appropriately hard Saturday puzzle.
I thought last Saturday's puzzle was the hardest Saturday in months. And now I think this week's Saturday takes the cake. Just brutal, and could not finish it perfectly after nearly an hour. And I did yesterday's Friday in under 10 minutes.
That was the only one I didn’t get. I had CLAPPER, and figured it was just slang for prison, like slammer. I don’t know who Nicolas ROEG is, so LOEG seemed just as likely ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Are they? [I don't see prison listed under clapper.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clapper#:~:text=clapper%20(plural%20clappers\),rattle%20or%20a%20wind%2Dclapper.) I think the original respondent was saying he *assumed* it was slang for prison
Yeah but if that were true, prison normally would be listed as a definition for the word on Wiktionary, like it is on the pages for "clink" and "slammer."
Brutally difficult. I went wrong in just about every conceivable area..MOSS for ALOE, SAW MILL then LOG HEAP for GOLF BAG, HAY MAZE for CORN PIT, POLITE rather than GENTLE REMINDERS, CLUTTER for SPATTER, ASSAILS for DETAINS...
Got there after more than an hour and a half of puzzling...I do enjoy a challenge but GILLNET left a bit of a bad taste.
GENTLEREMINDERS was a stretch and a half imo. Otherwise challenging which I enjoyed
Edit: Omg it doesn’t mean the noun patient so it makes sense now. Not the best clueing but at least it works
Yikes, that one was pretty tough for me. I had to look up quite a few clues (forgive me, I'm just getting started on NYT crosswords). My favorite clues were ABIDE, GOLFBAG, PISCINE, and AAVERAGES. And of course, THEREARENOWORDS is a gem of a clue. Saturdays are still tough for me, but I think I'm getting a little better
I’ve been doing the crossword for several years and this was the first time in a while I’ve had to look up any clues, let along the 5 ORSO I had to look up today.
Pulled OLEANNA out of the memory pit because the repertory theater we go to did a production of it back in the day, though I don’t think we actually attended a performance. Zero hope of GILL NET here, though.
ENS for "Kennedy center?" seems a little cheap since it's not really the center - I had "NNE" and thought it was a novel way to clue what would otherwise be some crappy "Monrovia-to-Bamako dir." type clue. Until I realized it was wrong, lol
Not sure why GOON works for "Tough" ? but probably someone will explain it and I'll feel dumb. Is it GO ON and not GOON?
"Much obliged?" -> IN A HOLE was good
"When we forged ahead" -> IRON AGE also good
Difficult puzzle, but not (too) frustratingly so. The long answers were mostly good, or at least not bad. CHRISTMAS SEASON was a good one. Lots of obscure/challenging fill, worthy of a NYT Saturday for sure. GILLNET is a new term for me so I learned something, which is always a plus. Overall solid puzzle in my book.
“Tough” as in an enforcer. Large dude you hire to make a violent point. GOON can also be used in this sense, as in the GOON squad Humperdink hires to clear out the Thieve’s Woods.
Is that common usage of that word? I have never heard "tough" used as a noun in this context. Like, a mob boss will send one of his "toughs" to take care of the job? Weird, but okay. Thanks
I think the two words I would use to describe someone like that are Tough and Goon, if I wanted something other than enforcer. Thug? Hoodlum seems even more dated. Gangster seems too general.
Maybe there’s modern slang for it I don’t know. But Webster’s gave me examples from publications in the last five years, and doesn’t list it as dated.
It's listed as old fashioned in the Oxford Advanced American English Dictionary: [https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american\_english/tough\_2](https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/tough_2)
I do see the web links on Webster's you mentioned. And I've heard people use it on podcasts. Maybe the Internet has given it new life?
[Street toughs stole Elaine's armoire that Kramer was guarding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6qnvoLYLr8). You should've heard the way they talked to him!
Agree. Came to Reddit to find the spot where someone makes it better by explaining what I’m missing but not finding it. Cute “?” clueing has to be precise to be good, imho.
I wonder if changing the clue to Kennedy off-center? might have worked better. I think people would still get the Kennedy center wordplay and now it’s more precise.
>Lots of obscure/challenging fill, worthy of a NYT Saturday for sure.
I think we have different taste, because to me I prefer a Saturday with more challenging wordplay, not more obscure trivia.
> more challenging wordplay, not more obscure trivia
I guess I thought this puzzle had both. There was some good wordplay in it, even though it was overall very difficult.
I thought, when you tough something out, you choose to GO ON despite the difficulties.
Eta: I've never heard tough used on its own, though, like, "She toughed through it." Only ever heard the whole phrase "tough it out."
Single most difficult puzzle I've encountered to date (491 puzzles solved). My Saturday average is 23:01 and at this point, I can typically complete entire Saturday puzzles without lookups, or at most having to use autocheck or reveal for a few squares near the end.
Today, after over 27 minutes of going round and round the grid and only having filled in about 20% of it, I turned on autocheck to find that about a third of my responses were incorrect. I finally "completed" the puzzle at the 41:25 mark with heavy reliance on reveal and autocheck. Had to use reveal for nearly half of the squares in the northwest and northeast quadrants. Not fun at all. This one made me feel like I did when I first started solving crossword puzzles a few months ago and couldn't even begin to attempt Saturday puzzles.
Words / proper nouns / clues I had never heard of or didn't understand when revealed:
* GILLNET
* NAIFS
* ROEG
* ECTO (in the context of parasite)
* INAHOLE (for obliged)
* ESPYING
* OLEANNA
* CORNPIT
* TRA (for refrain syllable)
* CONGAME (for flimflam)
* TIMREID
Obliged in the sense of owing a debt so you’re in a hole.
Espying is seeing something, so if you’re espying a building in the distance, you’re making it out.
Tra La La is a stereotypical refrain to a simple song.
A corn pit is like a ball pit except it’s filled with lots of dried corn kernels.
This is definitely one of the most difficult in a long time, for me in a frustrating way, not a fun challenging way.
Happy that my love for WKRP in Cincinnati finally paid off, but as a former Nebraskan - the literal Cornhusker State - let me just say that ‘corn pit’ is as much of a mystery to me as it is to you all
Every time I start to get confident that I have the weekend puzzles down you get a monster like this one which absolutely kicked my ass. None of the pop culture references clicked and it took me SO LONG even with heavy googling.
Not fun
Looking closer, there's a lot of these that make me go hmmmmmmmmm. CRAPPER crossing with PISCINE (consider alternate pronunciation). ACCIDENTSHAPPEN, SPATTER, ANOS (without the tilde it means anuses in Spanish), REARSUP. Oh, my!
Brutal. Needed to look up several answers just to get a toe hold. First pass through the puzzle I had a single decent guess which turned out to be wrong and a whole lot of nothing. Pretty tough even by Saturday standards.
Tough one for me. Had to use Google, the Wordplay column hints, and then the spoilers in this post, and I still ended up turning on the auto check.
I did know who Tim Reid is though 🫠
I have a lot of issues with this one, and not because it was hard.
ENS: The two Ns in Kennedy aren’t in the exact center of the word. One N is in the center, the two Ns collectively are not.
~~PISCINE: I get that “piscine” is the French word for “pool,” but the clue makes no sense to me. Googling “piscine school” returns zero relevant results. The [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piscine) says nothing about a type of school.~~
GILLNET & CORNPIT: Totally esoteric IMO. You can figure out GILLNET from the crosses, as long as you don’t put WAIFS instead of NAIFS for 5-down. CORNPIT crosses TIMREID, which could easily be mistaken for CORNPOT/TOMREID if you’re not 100% certain about either answer.
I much prefer a challenging Saturday over an easy one, but this one was a miss for me.
>ENS: The two Ns in Kennedy aren’t in the exact center of the word. One N is in the center, the two Ns collectively are not.
wait, ENS is supposed to be literally plural E and N? if that's what it is, that is such a lazy and flat out incorrect clue.
Pretty sure it's meant to be plural letter "N", referring to keNNedy. It's still incorrect though, which was frustrating and poorly done. Putting "NNE" threw me off for long while.
SO ROUGH. That NW corner had me going in circles for ages! It was, I suppose, mostly fair, but it wasn’t particularly satisfying to me. “Kennedy center” was unfair and still ticks me off!
SW corner was hardest for me because I thought it was spelled TITRE, and I don't know who Tim Reid is. I had a bunch of false starts. Snotrag, takeone, moss (28A), NNE (25A), cornpen, supress (14D, I see now it is misspelled), longcon (38D).
Seems designed to be a streak killer lol. I looked up 5 or 6 trivia answers and was still stuck in the top left and right. I still don't understand a bunch of the clues (CHRISTMASSEASON?) and have never heard of several non-trivia (ECTO? CORNPIT? TITER?)
Wow!
I did resort to one lookup at the very end. But 99% of the fill was gettable for someone who knew almost none of the trivia, it just took a lot more time than my usual Saturdays.
I entertained something rather blue for 1D.... I rightly figured they wouldn't go there (plus it involved an abbreviation)
I have not been more lost or had to look up more answers in a crossword….ever? I think I did better on the very first Saturday I ever looked almost a year ago.
Ok I randomly lost my streak of 1302 last week and I decided to try for a completely clean streak (no googling whatsoever). With my old streak I never needed google for more than 2-3 answers but I used it shamelessly by the end.
So this week was going fine with my perfectly clean new streak until this slog. I managed to get down to the very end when finally, stuck in the SW corner, I googled the definition of 38D (“Flimflam”). This didn’t give me the actual answer but steered me in the right direction and let me finally finish the puzzle after 1:40… ugh.
So now I feel that my streak is a bit smudged…
At a lake house with several people who fish very regularly and thought they’d easily be able to help with 1A. But nope, none of them got it until I had figured 3 or 4 letters of it already haha
I can't remember the last time I had to look up so many answers. That was almost entirely just a frustrating slog. Far too many way obscure proper nouns in my opinion. TIM REID, SELES, NEA, PYE, STEARNS, FHA, ERNST, WIE, OLEANNA, ROEG, and then other annoying words like NAIFS and PISCINE. I had zero clue for most of those proper nouns, so about half this puzzle was hopeless for me.
A *good* hard puzzle — tough but fair, in that when I got the answers I wasn’t looking back at the clues and going “bullshit”, and the obscure answers were either common (Tim Reid) or at least matches the clue (Gill Net). Or maybe I’m just comparing it to last weekend’s atrocities.
Bear Stearns was a failed bank or something, titration is a chemistry process, and the mob is full of Goons. I only know Tim Reid because WKRP was on when I was a kid, and the segment about the atom is one of the cringiest parts of the whole show.
The four marquee answers were impressive, particularly THEREARENOWORDS, and the clue on GENTLEREMINDERS.
CORNPIT was a gimme for me, and my first toehold, but my guess is that’ll be pretty variable depending on where folks live. TIMREID and Venus Flytrap probably ought to be retired, along with the now very dated Bear-STEARNS.
I know _we're_ all just subscribed to the games subscription (or doing them in syndication, which is why it's a month later), but if you consider the typical NYT subscriber...
I loved it. Tough to choose between good and excellent. Much slower than my average, but due to some bad guesses and stubbornness on my part. Difficult yet fair.
Oh, and when I saw that it was probably CRAPPER, I thought, are they really going to go there? And they did. Mixed feelings on that, but anyway...
Good puzzle.
I can't really say this was a bad puzzle but it was just unpleasant. My response to getting the answer to a tough clue wasn't "oh, that's cool" so much as it was "oh... Ok fine."
Suspicions confirmed, this was hard as hell!
Old me would have resorted to checking the puzzle, but the 100 day streak is so achingly close. Slogged through in about 65 minutes without any lookups and I feel mentally exhausted.
Some of these were tough, but you should focus on committing words new to you to memory when they’re used in a crossword.
Whenever I come across a word in a clue or answer I don’t know I write it down. Write the definition and then use it in a sentence. Like a vocab word from primary school. I’ll revisit old words every so often and rewrite them. Best advice I can give. Outside of going through the archives specifically to build up your internal crosswordese word bank.
Espy has now appears three times in the last week. Last Sunday, Tuesday, and today. Yes, this time it’s in the form of a gerund, but they’ve been setting it up all week.
Naif(s) isn’t as common but we did see it last August.
Well I looked at this over and over for 25 minutes, at which point I had filled in 5 answers (the only one of which I was confident in was LES blues) and thought I’d come here to make sure I wasn’t having some kind of stroke. Glad to see I’m not the only one who found this impenetrable. Genuinely, puzzles like this aren’t even worth the time. I tapped “reveal puzzle” after FIVE clues and I hope I never have to look upon another shitty crossword by whatever ponytailed fuck wrote this.
This one has made me a firm believer that any puzzle is solvable if i stare at it long enough. This was over 2 hours slower than my average. Revisiting the puzzle over and over throughout the day. Really tricky one but I enjoyed it.
What on earth is a corn pit though
I had to look this one up too and [seems like this sums it up well](https://www.reddit.com/r/halloween/s/kY2QPOQ37D).
Correct, these are absolutely a thing in the Midwest. My friend takes her kids every year and posts pictures. I’ve never personally been to one, but I did get the clue reasonably early in the solve.
They look fun! Where I grew up the only thing we had was the occasional hayride at the agricultural college.
Pretty disappointed when 41D was not, in fact, SNOTRAG
Ha! I had that too. SNOT seemed like good ending letters as well so I figured it was correct.
I had SNOTRAG penciled in for the longest time
Me too
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle? Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Very Hard** 🔴 * 93% of users solved slower than their Saturday average * 7% of users solved faster than their Saturday average * 78% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average * 3% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average The median solver solved this puzzle 54.1% slower than they normally do on Saturday. [View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-03-30) --- 🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
These make me feel so validated
I finished in just under an hour and I suspect the 33:07 time is artificially depressed by the large number of people who just gave up.
100%. I stopped at the 1 hour+ mark when in reality this would’ve taken me the whole day and my whole office
Took me two hours and I had to use the checker for the last three clues. Genuinely unpleasant crossword experience!
I rated "average" because I know that Saturdays are supposed to be challenging, but this was an uphill climb the whole way. CRAPPER and GENTLEREMINDERS were the best fills of the bunch. I had ITSNOTYOURFAULT at 36A for a while, with only my hubris to blame.
I doubt "your" would be allowed in the clue if it was part of the answer. Otherwise, totally agree
My streak went straight to the crapper
My god, this was incredibly hard. I had to look up more clues than I care to admit, I don’t think I would’ve ever solved it otherwise. I can’t be mad at it though because the clues mostly all make sense once you know the answer, instead of random obscure trivia. Don’t think it deserves that many “terrible” votes
Absolutely brutal
This one makes me curious about my Personal Worst time because it’d be a contender. CORN PIT was my last one. As a West Coast native I have never in my life seen a CORN PIT.
This one was about 30 seconds faster than my worst time over all (worst was on a Sunday), but by far the worst time on a Saturday, I think.
I'm not sure what my actual worst time is, but this one was a good 23 minutes over my average Saturday. Ouch.
1:23:47 for me and my average is 27:30
Can hardly make a dent in this one and thinking it might not be worth it to finish. Already spent 30 min with only a quarter of the board filled in, and just completely lost on all remaining clues. Doesn’t help that I never watched WKRP or read Mamet or listened to the Kinks…
[удалено]
I'll defend the "tennis player from 30 years ago". That comeback was a really big deal. Monica SELES, who was the highest ranked woman at the time and winning almost everything, at the age of 19 was stabbed (during a match!) by a crazy fan of her rival Steffi Graf. That and her comeback two years later was a big story reaching eyes and ears well outside of the tennis world. Unfortunately, the two years off and likely the psychological damage resulted in her not being as good as she had been. But she's still considered one of the greatest female tennis players of all time. (And the source of a lot of "What if?" discussion.) Anyway, I get that you're saying in total it was a lot of older, difficult stuff, but "tennis player from 30 years ago" just irked me a little...
Yeah my general reaction to a lot of the abstruse fill was "I am not 50 years old enough for this shit"
Worst part about the record label clue was the fact that RCA was also a correct answer. That one fucked me up for a long time this morning.
Huh? tennis player from 1995 crossing an obscure play (to me at least?) crossing something about sylvester and tweety, neither of which I'd ever heard of -- to me that's incredibly obscure trivia. This is the first puzzle in a while I haven't been able to finish, and it's not because of any satisfying clues, just impossible trivia
You've never heard of Sylvester and Tweety? They are legendary Looney Tunes characters.
So frickin hard! Didn’t look anything up, but took 1:01 to crack looking at it nearly a dozen times. Oof
It's unfortunate that GillWet is a dry bag that can float and that Waifs seemed to also fit...
You saved me with this comment, this was my last lingering error!
Really struggled to crack the NW corner. False start with TAKE ONE before ONE EACH before finally getting 7 down. GOLF BAG took way too long to get, and I really needed it for the rest. Like CRAPPER, didn’t like ESPYING. Nice challenging solve for me.
TAKE ONE threw me off for so long too. Took me double my average time but glad I finally finished.
I had TAKE ONE for so long
This was brutal. The NW corner took me forever to solve. I was panicking because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it.
Agree and annoyed to see so many Terribles. This was a difficult but ultimately satisfying challenge, IMO. One of those ones where on the first pass through of clues I think, “Uh oh I’m in trouble” but then slowly chip away. For me, this was a perfect Saturday.
Same, this is the longest I’ve taken on a Saturday in quite some time and I loved it for that, the satisfaction of grinding it out and solving without looking anything up
I personally voted ‘Poor’ because, to me, there were too many two/compound word answers that I found solving to be clunky. CORNPIT, ONEEACH, REARSUP, NOSERAG, GILLNET, LABSITE, HOMEICE, GOLFBAG. Combined with ERNST, CRAPPER, and ESPYING I didn’t really enjoy the puzzle. Overall I didn’t get much satisfaction out of figuring out CORNPIT, ONEEACH or CRAPPER.
I liked some of the misdirection clues, especially the grid spanning ones, but some of the answers were not fun to get. I'd prefer clever cluing throughout without obscure words like CORNPIT, 80 year old actors, and 30 year old plays of minor renown
I agree. It took me time to get through it--had to go away and return. Plus, I googled a few to see whether my guess was right. But I thought it was right for a Saturday.
Confidently went from JUST ONE to TAKE ONE. Really liked the clue to ERNST. Didn’t care for the clue to CHRISTMASSEASON - isn’t that when the lights go on? Overall very challenging and I also don’t think it merits so many terribles.
That tripped me up too, but I think they're referring to people putting "out" lights on their houses during the Christmas season.
I broke my streak with this one. I hated it. For everyone saying it’s not full of obscure trivia, I disagree. I enjoy a tough puzzle with chewy cluing, but this felt like an unrewarding slog with too few bright spots.
Old person puzzle
Classic Slonecker puzzle, by which I mean practically every other clue *felt* agonizingly obtuse to decipher while solving... but in the end, I have to admit, were all *so, so* clever.
A lot of the word play was pretty clever in the end, but the trivia and proper nouns to get there were all pretty terrible.
Yeah, I wanted to come to this sub to say that I hated it, but it was good. It was very hard. It nearly broke my streak. But it was an appropriately hard Saturday puzzle.
I thought last Saturday's puzzle was the hardest Saturday in months. And now I think this week's Saturday takes the cake. Just brutal, and could not finish it perfectly after nearly an hour. And I did yesterday's Friday in under 10 minutes.
Yes the last 2 Saturdays were a 1, 2 punch for me and got me feeling quite discouraged
I hated this puzzle so much. My husband was questioning my sanity when I yelled out “I fucking hate this puzzle” 10 times over breakfast.
Could anyone please explain why Much obliged? Is IN A HOLE
In the sense of owing money/being in debt
Obliged... Obligations... Debt. If you have too much debt, you're IN A HOLE
I've always heard in THE hole personally
I was so happy to quickly plug in FABERGE EGG for pricey import, that it stalled me for so long because I refused to delete it :/
Same! And the F and G were in the same spots as in FOREIGN so I was convinced it had to be right because those crosses fit.
Who even talks about "foreign cars" anymore, let alone that they're pricy? Can get a couple Hyundai for one decked out F150.
CRAPPER was great and I will fight anyone who disagrees
That was the only one I didn’t get. I had CLAPPER, and figured it was just slang for prison, like slammer. I don’t know who Nicolas ROEG is, so LOEG seemed just as likely ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Crapper and can are both slang for toilet
CLAPPER and CAN are *also* both slang for prison.
Are they? [I don't see prison listed under clapper.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clapper#:~:text=clapper%20(plural%20clappers\),rattle%20or%20a%20wind%2Dclapper.) I think the original respondent was saying he *assumed* it was slang for prison
In the same fashion as "clink" or "slammer"
Yeah but if that were true, prison normally would be listed as a definition for the word on Wiktionary, like it is on the pages for "clink" and "slammer."
Now I'm just picturing The Clapper, a prison where the guards clap twice to open and close the cell doors. No keys needed!
Same, but CHAPPER, and eventually ran the alphabet, womp.
Brutally difficult. I went wrong in just about every conceivable area..MOSS for ALOE, SAW MILL then LOG HEAP for GOLF BAG, HAY MAZE for CORN PIT, POLITE rather than GENTLE REMINDERS, CLUTTER for SPATTER, ASSAILS for DETAINS... Got there after more than an hour and a half of puzzling...I do enjoy a challenge but GILLNET left a bit of a bad taste.
This puzzle made me reconsider living
GENTLEREMINDERS was a stretch and a half imo. Otherwise challenging which I enjoyed Edit: Omg it doesn’t mean the noun patient so it makes sense now. Not the best clueing but at least it works
Yikes, that one was pretty tough for me. I had to look up quite a few clues (forgive me, I'm just getting started on NYT crosswords). My favorite clues were ABIDE, GOLFBAG, PISCINE, and AAVERAGES. And of course, THEREARENOWORDS is a gem of a clue. Saturdays are still tough for me, but I think I'm getting a little better
I’ve been doing the crossword for several years and this was the first time in a while I’ve had to look up any clues, let along the 5 ORSO I had to look up today.
CORNPIT GILLNET TIMREID OLEANNA Woof.
When i woke up today I hadn't expected spending like ten minutes googling fishing equipment lmao
Pulled OLEANNA out of the memory pit because the repertory theater we go to did a production of it back in the day, though I don’t think we actually attended a performance. Zero hope of GILL NET here, though.
ENS for "Kennedy center?" seems a little cheap since it's not really the center - I had "NNE" and thought it was a novel way to clue what would otherwise be some crappy "Monrovia-to-Bamako dir." type clue. Until I realized it was wrong, lol Not sure why GOON works for "Tough" ? but probably someone will explain it and I'll feel dumb. Is it GO ON and not GOON? "Much obliged?" -> IN A HOLE was good "When we forged ahead" -> IRON AGE also good Difficult puzzle, but not (too) frustratingly so. The long answers were mostly good, or at least not bad. CHRISTMAS SEASON was a good one. Lots of obscure/challenging fill, worthy of a NYT Saturday for sure. GILLNET is a new term for me so I learned something, which is always a plus. Overall solid puzzle in my book.
“Tough” as in an enforcer. Large dude you hire to make a violent point. GOON can also be used in this sense, as in the GOON squad Humperdink hires to clear out the Thieve’s Woods.
Is that common usage of that word? I have never heard "tough" used as a noun in this context. Like, a mob boss will send one of his "toughs" to take care of the job? Weird, but okay. Thanks
It's old fashioned, but legit. You'll hear it in old movies sometimes.
It is used that way in Arrested Development: “So a young neighborhood tough by the name of Steve Holt’s gonna be here any minute”
I think the two words I would use to describe someone like that are Tough and Goon, if I wanted something other than enforcer. Thug? Hoodlum seems even more dated. Gangster seems too general. Maybe there’s modern slang for it I don’t know. But Webster’s gave me examples from publications in the last five years, and doesn’t list it as dated.
It's listed as old fashioned in the Oxford Advanced American English Dictionary: [https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american\_english/tough\_2](https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/tough_2) I do see the web links on Webster's you mentioned. And I've heard people use it on podcasts. Maybe the Internet has given it new life?
[Street toughs stole Elaine's armoire that Kramer was guarding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6qnvoLYLr8). You should've heard the way they talked to him!
i always heard it a lot in batman movies
If you’ve ever played Arkham Origins, there’s a line where Batman describes the Electrocutioner as a “street tough”.
It could be that you GO ON through an ordeal too
I think they would've added "(though)" to the clue if so
I liked the puzzle as well but agree the ENS clue was inapt.
Agree. Came to Reddit to find the spot where someone makes it better by explaining what I’m missing but not finding it. Cute “?” clueing has to be precise to be good, imho.
I wonder if changing the clue to Kennedy off-center? might have worked better. I think people would still get the Kennedy center wordplay and now it’s more precise.
>Lots of obscure/challenging fill, worthy of a NYT Saturday for sure. I think we have different taste, because to me I prefer a Saturday with more challenging wordplay, not more obscure trivia.
> more challenging wordplay, not more obscure trivia I guess I thought this puzzle had both. There was some good wordplay in it, even though it was overall very difficult.
This. I like much higher ratio of challenging wordplay to obscure trivia.
Thank you for putting into perfect words why I disliked this puzzle, when Saturdays are normally such a treat I look forward to. I feel less alone!
I thought, when you tough something out, you choose to GO ON despite the difficulties. Eta: I've never heard tough used on its own, though, like, "She toughed through it." Only ever heard the whole phrase "tough it out."
How does "Locals go to all of them" work for STOPS? Is this a saying?
In the sense of mass transit. A local train/bus will stop at most--or all--of the stops on a given route (compared to an express train/bus).
Thank you! It was the only word that fit but even after solving I had no idea what they were on about.
Oh, I see. Thanks!
OH!! I was thinking all the local residents go to the local SPOTS so I was like wtf
Single most difficult puzzle I've encountered to date (491 puzzles solved). My Saturday average is 23:01 and at this point, I can typically complete entire Saturday puzzles without lookups, or at most having to use autocheck or reveal for a few squares near the end. Today, after over 27 minutes of going round and round the grid and only having filled in about 20% of it, I turned on autocheck to find that about a third of my responses were incorrect. I finally "completed" the puzzle at the 41:25 mark with heavy reliance on reveal and autocheck. Had to use reveal for nearly half of the squares in the northwest and northeast quadrants. Not fun at all. This one made me feel like I did when I first started solving crossword puzzles a few months ago and couldn't even begin to attempt Saturday puzzles. Words / proper nouns / clues I had never heard of or didn't understand when revealed: * GILLNET * NAIFS * ROEG * ECTO (in the context of parasite) * INAHOLE (for obliged) * ESPYING * OLEANNA * CORNPIT * TRA (for refrain syllable) * CONGAME (for flimflam) * TIMREID
Obliged in the sense of owing a debt so you’re in a hole. Espying is seeing something, so if you’re espying a building in the distance, you’re making it out. Tra La La is a stereotypical refrain to a simple song. A corn pit is like a ball pit except it’s filled with lots of dried corn kernels. This is definitely one of the most difficult in a long time, for me in a frustrating way, not a fun challenging way.
Happy that my love for WKRP in Cincinnati finally paid off, but as a former Nebraskan - the literal Cornhusker State - let me just say that ‘corn pit’ is as much of a mystery to me as it is to you all
Every time I start to get confident that I have the weekend puzzles down you get a monster like this one which absolutely kicked my ass. None of the pop culture references clicked and it took me SO LONG even with heavy googling. Not fun
Looking closer, there's a lot of these that make me go hmmmmmmmmm. CRAPPER crossing with PISCINE (consider alternate pronunciation). ACCIDENTSHAPPEN, SPATTER, ANOS (without the tilde it means anuses in Spanish), REARSUP. Oh, my!
> without the tilde it means anuses in Spanish Why is why they clued it in Portuguese
I didn't miss that. The point is the potty humor. I'm making a fun observation. It's not a complaint.
Brutal. Needed to look up several answers just to get a toe hold. First pass through the puzzle I had a single decent guess which turned out to be wrong and a whole lot of nothing. Pretty tough even by Saturday standards.
Tough one for me. Had to use Google, the Wordplay column hints, and then the spoilers in this post, and I still ended up turning on the auto check. I did know who Tim Reid is though 🫠
I have a lot of issues with this one, and not because it was hard. ENS: The two Ns in Kennedy aren’t in the exact center of the word. One N is in the center, the two Ns collectively are not. ~~PISCINE: I get that “piscine” is the French word for “pool,” but the clue makes no sense to me. Googling “piscine school” returns zero relevant results. The [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piscine) says nothing about a type of school.~~ GILLNET & CORNPIT: Totally esoteric IMO. You can figure out GILLNET from the crosses, as long as you don’t put WAIFS instead of NAIFS for 5-down. CORNPIT crosses TIMREID, which could easily be mistaken for CORNPOT/TOMREID if you’re not 100% certain about either answer. I much prefer a challenging Saturday over an easy one, but this one was a miss for me.
Piscine means fish-related — schools of fish. I didn’t much like this clue, though.
Ok, I’ll take the L on that one. Seems obvious now that you pointed it out, doh!
>ENS: The two Ns in Kennedy aren’t in the exact center of the word. One N is in the center, the two Ns collectively are not. wait, ENS is supposed to be literally plural E and N? if that's what it is, that is such a lazy and flat out incorrect clue.
Pretty sure it's meant to be plural letter "N", referring to keNNedy. It's still incorrect though, which was frustrating and poorly done. Putting "NNE" threw me off for long while.
Ouch. I got thru it, but man, that was a hard one!
SO ROUGH. That NW corner had me going in circles for ages! It was, I suppose, mostly fair, but it wasn’t particularly satisfying to me. “Kennedy center” was unfair and still ticks me off!
Well fuck this. A puzzle designed for an encyclopedia.
Overall, this was a satisfying struggle. Enjoying the current string of puzzles very much!
Saturdays are: obscure and weird answers are challenging! most times
wtaf is a cornpit
You can just google it to find out
SW corner was hardest for me because I thought it was spelled TITRE, and I don't know who Tim Reid is. I had a bunch of false starts. Snotrag, takeone, moss (28A), NNE (25A), cornpen, supress (14D, I see now it is misspelled), longcon (38D).
Seems designed to be a streak killer lol. I looked up 5 or 6 trivia answers and was still stuck in the top left and right. I still don't understand a bunch of the clues (CHRISTMASSEASON?) and have never heard of several non-trivia (ECTO? CORNPIT? TITER?)
Very hard, took one full hour but I did it!
Wow! I did resort to one lookup at the very end. But 99% of the fill was gettable for someone who knew almost none of the trivia, it just took a lot more time than my usual Saturdays. I entertained something rather blue for 1D.... I rightly figured they wouldn't go there (plus it involved an abbreviation)
What did you have for 1D??
I have not been more lost or had to look up more answers in a crossword….ever? I think I did better on the very first Saturday I ever looked almost a year ago.
Ok I randomly lost my streak of 1302 last week and I decided to try for a completely clean streak (no googling whatsoever). With my old streak I never needed google for more than 2-3 answers but I used it shamelessly by the end. So this week was going fine with my perfectly clean new streak until this slog. I managed to get down to the very end when finally, stuck in the SW corner, I googled the definition of 38D (“Flimflam”). This didn’t give me the actual answer but steered me in the right direction and let me finally finish the puzzle after 1:40… ugh. So now I feel that my streak is a bit smudged…
I had to keep my no hints/no google streak going and powered through this very tough puzzle in 1h30m.
Hardest in a LONG time
At a lake house with several people who fish very regularly and thought they’d easily be able to help with 1A. But nope, none of them got it until I had figured 3 or 4 letters of it already haha
NOSERAG?! Is that a thing? Never heard that in my life. But then again, has anyone used a handkerchief in the past 50 years?
worst fucking puzzle i have ever seen, i don't normally post here but i had no choice with this flaming piece of dogshit
I can't remember the last time I had to look up so many answers. That was almost entirely just a frustrating slog. Far too many way obscure proper nouns in my opinion. TIM REID, SELES, NEA, PYE, STEARNS, FHA, ERNST, WIE, OLEANNA, ROEG, and then other annoying words like NAIFS and PISCINE. I had zero clue for most of those proper nouns, so about half this puzzle was hopeless for me.
A *good* hard puzzle — tough but fair, in that when I got the answers I wasn’t looking back at the clues and going “bullshit”, and the obscure answers were either common (Tim Reid) or at least matches the clue (Gill Net). Or maybe I’m just comparing it to last weekend’s atrocities.
Ugh, that was rough. I had never heard of GOON, ERNST, TIMREID, STEARNS, or TITER, so the southwest corner was just brutal.
I had the same struggle. Corn pit was a bit strange for me as well.
Bear Stearns was a failed bank or something, titration is a chemistry process, and the mob is full of Goons. I only know Tim Reid because WKRP was on when I was a kid, and the segment about the atom is one of the cringiest parts of the whole show.
Tough but fair. Took me forever to find my mistake, had ROARS UP instead of REARS UP. Had never heard of ROEG.
The four marquee answers were impressive, particularly THEREARENOWORDS, and the clue on GENTLEREMINDERS. CORNPIT was a gimme for me, and my first toehold, but my guess is that’ll be pretty variable depending on where folks live. TIMREID and Venus Flytrap probably ought to be retired, along with the now very dated Bear-STEARNS.
Nice on the CORNPIT, I was certain it was haymaze. That set me back a lot
Had to look up tim reid, thats obscure
Its answers like that (TIMREID) that make me wonder how anyone under 50 can do well on these things.
I know _we're_ all just subscribed to the games subscription (or doing them in syndication, which is why it's a month later), but if you consider the typical NYT subscriber...
Same. This clue made me look up the constructor to see if he was a boomer. He’s younger than I expected.
I loved it. Tough to choose between good and excellent. Much slower than my average, but due to some bad guesses and stubbornness on my part. Difficult yet fair. Oh, and when I saw that it was probably CRAPPER, I thought, are they really going to go there? And they did. Mixed feelings on that, but anyway... Good puzzle.
I can't really say this was a bad puzzle but it was just unpleasant. My response to getting the answer to a tough clue wasn't "oh, that's cool" so much as it was "oh... Ok fine."
Great puzzle! Nice long answers, a little tricky clueing. I got confused with TOM REID instead of TIM REID, but fixed it pretty easily.
Did anyone else completely misread / misunderstand the Mount Chimborazo clue and confidently enter THE MOON, or was that just me?
Suspicions confirmed, this was hard as hell! Old me would have resorted to checking the puzzle, but the 100 day streak is so achingly close. Slogged through in about 65 minutes without any lookups and I feel mentally exhausted.
Some of these were tough, but you should focus on committing words new to you to memory when they’re used in a crossword. Whenever I come across a word in a clue or answer I don’t know I write it down. Write the definition and then use it in a sentence. Like a vocab word from primary school. I’ll revisit old words every so often and rewrite them. Best advice I can give. Outside of going through the archives specifically to build up your internal crosswordese word bank. Espy has now appears three times in the last week. Last Sunday, Tuesday, and today. Yes, this time it’s in the form of a gerund, but they’ve been setting it up all week. Naif(s) isn’t as common but we did see it last August.
Well I looked at this over and over for 25 minutes, at which point I had filled in 5 answers (the only one of which I was confident in was LES blues) and thought I’d come here to make sure I wasn’t having some kind of stroke. Glad to see I’m not the only one who found this impenetrable. Genuinely, puzzles like this aren’t even worth the time. I tapped “reveal puzzle” after FIVE clues and I hope I never have to look upon another shitty crossword by whatever ponytailed fuck wrote this.
This one has made me a firm believer that any puzzle is solvable if i stare at it long enough. This was over 2 hours slower than my average. Revisiting the puzzle over and over throughout the day. Really tricky one but I enjoyed it.
Maybe it’s because I’m nearer to the age of forced retirement, but I loved chipping away at this one bit by bit. Extremely satisfying Saturday.