"Stress Test" - July 3, 2020

[DBMiller]

The only nit I had with this puzzle was the some of the pronunciations. I got AN-te-lope, mas-SEUR, EYE-balls, to-BAC-co, and WORDS-man without issue. I just couldn't figure out how they wanted Lindsey pronounced. Most of the time I hear that name spoken, the D is "silent" and it comes out as either LIN-zee or lin-ZEE. But neither EYELIN or EYEZEE made any sense. When I went back the next morning, and saw SULPA, I remarked how odd an answer that was, and realized it was the only EYELIND in the puzzle.

[Nlbil]

I have never complained about an anseur before but, really! There was anseur, eyelind, and bacword. So it really made sense to me that since all the others were misspelled, then aplus should be applause, which is what I submitted. I think it should count as a second correct answer!!!??

[Bob cruise director]

After I got Answer Island Backwards, I went to the crossword interpretation of "island" as an isolated black square. Which brought to mind the Mike Shenk (aka Marie Kelly) (I had to look this up) contest of May 20, 2016 titled Driving Around where the answer of Cadillac Eldorado was the letters around the two single black squares. That delayed me for more than a little while.

Terrifying how past contests pop into your head.

[Wendy Walker]

To the more experienced solvers- is the alliteration in the long answer clues an intentional red herring, an accident, or just the antics of the witty wordsman?

This experienced solver spent hours counting the "A's" in Achy African Animals and the "W's" in Who Writes Wittily While, not to mention the "P's" in Philippines, and trying to do something with them ... especially since the hint contained a word that sounded like a number ("for") ...

[tim1217]

If the path to the answer is what I think it is, then this will definitely not be in my wheel house. And given a full day of yard work in 90+ degree heat, I'm happy to just sit with Isaac and enjoy several martinis (along with a couple of Tylenol).

The path started out just as I suspected, and yes, definitely not in my wheel house. I now know the initials MG do not stand for Matt Gaffney. They stand for Much Groaning.

[Tom Shea]

I said I was on shore, and indeed my answer was correct despite not getting the "click". My reasoning was this: SULPA stuck out like a sore thumb - if you Google Philippines islands, Sulpa barely exists. It would be an outrageously unfair entry under normal circumstances. And it happens to be A PLUS backwards, and that clearly answers the question, so voila! So I got the right answer without having noticed all the "answer island backwards" stuff, which indeed was the click that I was missing. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good......

I noticed the odd sulpa answer and never pursued it. Should have gotten the answer just from that since I had never seen that answer before. It is an uninhabited island, which should have been the dead giveaway.

Should have got it on that, but never would have got it by the pronunciation method.

[Wendy Walker]

I want to share two of my hilariously off-target rabbit holes:
(1) Substitute other appropriate words for the theme answers -- Antelope Masseur becomes Tiger Balm. Pretty good, huh! Tried mightily to do something with Lindsey Lohan for the second theme answer.
(2) Add a word between the two words of each theme answer and then change a letter -- Tobacco Tin Woodsman.
As you can imagine it was not a pretty weekend here in the Walker homestead, but it's been a VERY GOOD Monday morning indeed.

[SusieG]

Oof, I didn't give this one enough credit (ha) for its cleverness. I had the right idea but didn't follow it through. Congrats to those who got it!

Edited to admit my answer: I literally submitted "island" backwards, DNALSI. Now I'm embarrassed...

I nearly did that! My next idea was to submit NAPAJ. I had an idea there must be more clues, so started running through all the answers that were multi syllabic when I came across SULPA. Forgot it was even there!

[damefox]

Another puzzle where I stared for quite a while getting nowhere ( I definitely went down the "achy African animals" and who writes wittily while" rabbit hole). When that happens, it dawns on me it must be a "sounds like" mechanism. I then spent another while trying to parse how "Stress Test" could be a "sounds like" indicator. I dunno why it didn't click immediately that it was referring to the stressed syllables in the words, but I finally figured it out, and then it was pretty straightforward. I don't like "sounds like" metas though, not only because they're tough for me personally to see, but also because it seems a little presumptuous for the constructor to assume they know how everyone pronounces things. I for one did not know that "masseur" could be pronounced "muh-SIR" instead of "muh-SOOR" and had to backsolve that bit. Also, as people have pointed out, there are two instances of secondary stresses in these particular words. I had to Google their pronunciation to verify which syllable was considered the "main" stress. Not really what I'm looking for in a meta solving experience.

[tim1217]

That bottle was a gift from a friend in Versailles.

I assume you mean Versailles, Kentucky. Funny story since I went to school for a year in Versailles, France. I was in Lexington (KY) a few years back and asked the local sitting next to me at the bar what bourbon distillery was best to visit since I only had time for one. He said, Woodford Reserve. I said; "Oh that's the one in Versailles" (spoken the French way). He said; "You're not in France boy, you in Kentucky, we pronounce it VER SALES"!

I also live not far from a town in Illinois called Marsailles. So given my background, I always like to pronounce it as MAR-SAY (even though there is an extra S on the end from the French city). Fellow native Illinoisans however pronounce it as MAR-SALES. Lest you think I might be making fun of my fellow natives, we always get a chuckle when an out-of-stater pronounces Illinois as ILL-I-NOISE.

[tim1217]

I want to share two of my hilariously off-target rabbit holes:
(1) Substitute other appropriate words for the theme answers -- Antelope Masseur becomes Tiger Balm. Pretty good, huh! Tried mightily to do something with Lindsey Lohan for the second theme answer.
(2) Add a word between the two words of each theme answer and then change a letter -- Tobacco Tin Woodsman.
As you can imagine it was not a pretty weekend here in the Walker homestead, but it's been a VERY GOOD Monday morning indeed.

Along the same lines, I got hung up thinking 'Guy who writes wittily while smoking a cigar?' had to be Mark Twain.

[TPS]

.

==> A MOMENT AT LAST TO REST

Your answer is way better than the actual answer.

[Bird Lives]

I got this one right away. I had a hunch the stress in the title referred to stressed syllables, and BAC-WORDS confirmed it. So I never got to thinking about the clues. But when the entries unusual combinations that make so little sense, the chances are that the gimmick lies in the grid, not in the clues.

But I never found the Saturday variety puzzle or crossword. They're not on the Website. Were they in the print edition?

[Devilbunny]

I noticed the odd sulpa answer and never pursued it. Should have gotten the answer just from that since I had never seen that answer before. It is an uninhabited island, which should have been the dead giveaway.

Should have got it on that, but never would have got it by the pronunciation method.

I missed it for a long time because I had no clue what it was (nor, I think, did anyone without an extraordinary knowledge of Philippine geography) and so depended on the crosses to fill the squares. Only a third scan of the grid made me notice it. (I’m bad about not looking at the clues.) I thought, what the heck is SULPA? Looked at the clue, and there I was on shore.

[SewYoung]

I got this one right away. I had a hunch the stress in the title referred to stressed syllables, and BAC-WORDS confirmed it. So I never got to thinking about the clues. But when the entries unusual combinations that make so little sense, the chances are that the gimmick lies in the grid, not in the clues.

But I never found the Saturday variety puzzle or crossword. They're not on the Website. Were they in the print edition?

As Saturday was a holiday, there was no WSJ issue, therefore no puzzle. Hoping for a good variety puzzle this week to make up for it. Is it Cryptic week?!!

[CPJohnson]

The puzzle that this one brought to mind was 10-12-18, No Presents, Please. The title referred to present tense verbs in the theme answers. When I saw "stress" in the title, I immediately started looking for a grammatical road to the answer.

[sanmilton]

Any further comment risks rehash, but I will chime in about the alliteration in the clues as a red herring. (Proud of yourself, M.G.?) Also, the very first word of the very first clue (for 1A) was Quiz, and that seemed to impart special importance to the VOCAB entry. I looked for alternative ANTELOPE, like eland, oryx, and GAZELLE and then found MAZE and BELLE in the grid (So?), and EYEBALLS could be ORBS (which I found in diagonally connected in the grid) or oculi, and they, too, provided no insight whatever. And what could TOBACCO be but weed or leaf, and what did it matter?! At last, on Thursday, I put this sucker down, refreshed my eyeballs overnight, and took another look at it on Friday, when I finally decided that this was another kind of stress test entirely! A-ha!

However, all of that rabbit chasing came after I immediately saw that SULPA was A-PLUS backwards, and that A-PLUS would be a pretty good answer to the prompt. Then came the overthinking: "Would he?" And the answer to that was that he would, but only with a devilishly clever pointer to substantiate it.

I'd go ahead and give Mr. G an A+ for this one, notwithstanding the understandable quibbles about the secondary stresses, because, let's face it, no one ever puts the primary stress on LOPE or .... (Scratch that!)

[burak]

I'm doing what the mechanism is telling me to do and I'm getting a nonsensical answer. There are some metas that are particularly difficult for people like me, and this is one of them and I almost always hate those. Very few exceptions.

I can see why the majority would like this one though, yet I feel unintentionally discriminated against. Oh well.

Edit: Well, kinda miraculously I solved it. I'd like to thank TPS for listening me rant about why this one is particularly difficult for me (I'll write more after the deadline without fear of spoilers but people who're familiar with my posts might know what's going on here) and kindly suggesting a method that could help me in the future.

Let me explain what I meant here now that the fear of spoiling it for others is gone: Pronunciation-based metas are my least favorite as a non-native speaker. I'm definitely not speaking for all non-native speakers, but stuff like silent letters or intonation you cannot check in a resource. Well, the little apostrophe in the IPA spelling tells you which syllable to stress, but only for common nouns. Metas that can be ambiguous are not the funnest to solve, metas that I clearly know what's happening but cannot find an answer because I lack a skill can be doubly frustrating.

Anyway, TPS and BarbaraK were kind enough to listen to me vent my frustration out and in the process I found the answer: I had figured out the ANSWER (at first I thought it was ENTER (ANT-elope/mass-EUR) but TPS nudged me) and BACKWARDS parts, but for the second themer I was like ?!?! How do you say Lindsey: Lind-SEY, or LIND-sey? EYE-SEY, when read backwards, sounds like EASY YAH? Maybe the answer is EASY A? EASY HUH?

As I was double-checking my answers with Google just to make sure I filled it our alright, I came across Sulpa and thought "Oh I probably made a mistake here, what the eff kind of an answer is that?" As I was typing it in, my brain went "YOU IDIOT IT SPELLS A PLUS BACKWARDS". Everything fell into place at that moment.

But yeah, still not my favorite meta because as soon as I realize pronunciation is involved I'm almost immediately turned off. Maybe it'll change one day.

[Tony S]

I got this one right away. I had a hunch the stress in the title referred to stressed syllables, and BAC-WORDS confirmed it. So I never got to thinking about the clues. But when the entries unusual combinations that make so little sense, the chances are that the gimmick lies in the grid, not in the clues.

But I never found the Saturday variety puzzle or crossword. They're not on the Website. Were they in the print edition?

As Saturday was a holiday, there was no WSJ issue, therefore no puzzle. Hoping for a good variety puzzle this week to make up for it. Is it Cryptic week?!!

By my reckoning there should be a Cox/ Rathvon cryptic this coming Saturday. In Canada's National Post there is a Cox/ Rathvon cryptic every Saturday. It doesn't have an unusual twist like their WSJ puzzle but they are solid crosswords worth checking out.
natpostcryptic.blogspot.com

[fuggedabowdit]

Another route to the island.
All three long answers have double letters(SS, LL, CC) as does STRESS(SS) in the title. Only one clue, 42 acroSS, contains all 3 of these letters in the order in which they are presented in the grid (S-L-C). Coincidence?? or bassackwards?? A-Plus meta