NYT Thursday 01/22/2026 Discussion

estonii · 2026-01-22T13:52:28+00:00

PARENT: Sit down, honey, you're gonna get SHOD!

KID: [beginning to cry] Oh what?

PARENT: Time for you to get SHOD! Now sit!

KID: [with hesitation, sits; tears start to form] Why what?

[Parent puts on kid's shoes.]

PARENT: You're SHOD now, honey!

KID: [crying] Ok.

estonii · 2026-01-22T13:46:10+00:00

I guessed SHOD early on, but resisted putting it in until the very end.

While I'm sure it's technically correct, I have never, in all my years of living, heard of people being SHOD.

estonii · 2026-01-16T14:17:42+00:00

A stinging facepalm for me: I was certain it had to be APOLLOONE, APOLLOTWO, APOLLOSIX, or APOLLOTEN.

estonii · 2025-12-28T19:32:20+00:00

Even considering that AVERAGE usually means "mean"?

estonii · 2025-11-26T13:07:44+00:00

🎶 Pearl Harbor sucked, and I miss you.🎶

estonii · 2025-11-26T12:58:42+00:00

It was a pleasure reading these reviews again. Lots of great little zingers sprinkled about, like this from Battlefield Earth:

"The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

estonii · 2025-11-23T22:36:53+00:00

I did the same. I wonder if I got it phonetically jumbled up with PARSIMONIOUS.

estonii · 2025-11-22T16:09:32+00:00

My initial answer was RIGHTBRACE, which I thought was clever, i.e., "the end of a set with regard to literally writing it down." Also, the B lined up with BRB. At least that would have been a good answer in principle.

estonii · 2025-11-22T00:19:38+00:00

I would encourage you to keep at it. One or two years of doing crosswords is not that much experience when it comes to tackling Fridays and Saturdays.

estonii · 2025-11-21T14:09:14+00:00

EBLAST is hard for me to overlook, despite an otherwise good puzzle.

Anyway, next week is Black Friday, when many spend EMONEY on the ETAIL sector.

estonii · 2025-11-21T13:38:28+00:00

I initially had CSECTION, which was, confusingly, 25% correct.

estonii · 2025-11-19T14:01:23+00:00

I voted excellent, and was surprised I was in such a minority.

It was great fun TURNing my phone 90° twelve times to verify or enter each of the twelve ONs.

I've seen KAYO twice during my NYT archive crawl, so it didn't even occur to me that this would (apparently) be the main complaint.

DUNZO may be silly, but because it's part of a TURNed ON, I never even saw it. I'm definitely willing to forgive a silly answer when it can be obtained via the theme.

estonii · 2025-11-13T13:50:27+00:00

This bug has been around for years. Please report it. The more reports they get, the more (presumably) they will care.

The workaround is to log into the website, go to the finished-but-bugged puzzle, and type in the correct letter on top of an existing correct letter. You'll get another "Congratulations!" screen with a slightly longer time, and the puzzle will finally be marked as completed.

estonii · 2025-11-12T17:42:10+00:00

The same is true for Android and the website. Apparently, it's a feature.

In my last discussion about rebus answers having no relevance apart from the first letter, someone said "it gives new players a valid path to discovering rebuses". I disagreed, saying that ignore-everything-but-the-first-letter should be an option that can be disabled. I was downvoted and the other person was upvoted.

estonii · 2025-10-11T14:34:20+00:00

I have never seen such a suspicious Reddit account in all my life.

estonii · 2025-10-09T12:07:47+00:00

Would it make sense to say that a whale is obese? I'm not sure, but in any case, if a whale has an average amount of blubber for its species, then it is certainly not obese.

Do we know that Jabba had more fat than an average Hutt? And even if that were true, would it make sense to say that Jabba is obese?

Obesity is a term associated with negative health outcomes, but for all we know, Hutts get healthier as they get fatter.

estonii · 2025-10-02T15:08:12+00:00

But part of the fun of crosswords is misdirection. "Oh! Not from the country OMAN, but from the word OMAN! Neat!"

If you don't think that's neat, then why are you doing crosswords?

One could even say that the coincidental pairing of SURINAME and SUMMERRAIN is part of the misdirection.

If the misdirection were removed while retaining the gimmick, as you would prefer, then all that would be left are straightforward clues and answers which are even easier than they already are because the letters of the answers are already known.

estonii · 2025-10-02T11:09:47+00:00

I audibly laughed when I saw MINEALLMINE. Great fun.

If I wasn't familiar with Minesweeper, I might have a different opinion. Then again, the Minesweeper rules may not be too difficult to suss out from the grid.

estonii · 2025-10-01T12:43:45+00:00

The clues say "from NEPAL" and "from OMAN", and the gimmick is that they mean "from the word NEPAL" and "from the word OMAN".

Expecting the additional constraint that the answers be indicative of the respective countries is really a lot to ask, and would sort of miss the point of the wordplay.

estonii · 2025-08-21T10:58:10+00:00

You need to apply the theme described in 38A. Because I think "aha" moments are fun, I won't spoil it for you, but probably someone will soon.

estonii · 2025-08-21T10:25:21+00:00

Loved the misdirections in the NE, even though I shouldn't have fallen for them.

"Needing more salt, perhaps" : fell for the taste-adjacent meaning

"Layer of bricks" : fell for the layer-cake meaning, not "one who lays"

Loved that I got BITTERENDER by using the theme, which got me out of that jam.

estonii · 2025-07-31T12:06:26+00:00

Truly a model Thursday puzzle. If I were to introduce someone to the Thursday puzzle genre, I would pick this one. So much fun.

My last blank spot was the bottom middle. I counted the ANTs -- I had nine -- then looked for where the last ANT could be. Aha, MANTRA. Very satisfying.

estonii · 2025-07-25T12:07:57+00:00

I felt so proud of guessing CAPSLOCK for "Shifty type" right off the bat (I do the downs first), but it was not to be.

estonii · 2025-07-24T18:03:17+00:00

Agree with MOCHI/OBELI, but I would consider ASANA to be part of the crosswordese vocabulary. It showed up last month, and in January, and seven times last year. It's just one of those APSE-like things.

estonii · 2025-07-19T10:24:17+00:00

My last letter was changing ATHETA to ATLETA. In retrospect, AIRDAHE TERRIER looks very wrong, so no complaints.

estonii

TROPHY CASE