Fun! Once again I repeat-it doesn't matter that I don't know something. Again, foreign words with uninferable spellings, but this time I did not know them at all. well the rest of the puzzle is really just OMAKASE ( 36A: Sushi chef's tasting menu) and ISFAHAN (7D: Capital of ancient Persia), two names I had absolutely no hope on. All because of this "word." Do constructors / editors not consider what it will be like, for a solver, to turn up a word like this? It's not enough to think "it's valid!" Please consider the solver. This puzzle had a lovely sense of SPREZZATURA but with ALL-HEALS, it's all gone. was "cure-all" not enough? You somehow needed ALL-HEALS? Just a painful revelation. that's a thing?" What an incredibly stupid word. what? That is the kind of word where, when you get it, you think "that can't be right. The very worst thing down here, though-in fact, the only genuinely bad thing-is ALL-HEALS (56A: Herbalists' panaceas). That's what the remaining corners all felt like, especially the SW, where "_ SURE" could've been a whole bunch of things, and AURAL should've been TIDAL, and ARUM? Uh, whatever you say, I guess, and I've never thought of congee as GRUEL, though I guess technically it is. You're in this tiny little cave and there's nowhere to go.
And I guess it's worth noting that the heavily compartmentalized corners made this feel like a bunch of different puzzles rather than just one, and also meant that over and over it felt like you could just get stuck. All the air went out of this one in the SW. When I got SPREZZATURA, early in the solve, I actually thought that was a high point: ERSATZ SPREZZATURA WIZARDRY! That has the kind of zing I really like from my Friday puzzles and so rarely see on Saturdays.īut there was no more zing after that. I am not kidding when I say that I learned this word from this one discussion about the way some commentator described some team's way of playing basketball, and I have not heard / seen this word since, but thank god it stuck because wow without it, this puzzle would've probably been next-level difficult instead of just kind of difficult (without ITALY in the NE, don't know what I'd've done up there-it's how I got started in that section). I was lucky enough to know SPREZZATURA because of a dimly remembered conversation about basketball in the '90s ( 23D: The art of appearing effortlessly nonchalant). You want your Saturday puzzle to be tough, OK, but there are ways you can use in addition to foreign-name trivia, there really are. As a solver, I'd be happy to learn any one of these (assuming I didn't know them already), but yeesh, have some sense of proportion. Not one foreign word that is uninferable if you don't know it, but three foreign words that are uninferable if you don't know them. Not a lot of variety in this one, just the same posture of ERSATZ LEARNEDness over and over and over.
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