XWord Muggles Forum

Whew! Finally made it to shore, by way of a nice weekend visiting my son. (As fine an "excuse" as any for being late to the meta party.) Enjoyed some old Sondheim in a new bottle and had a thoroughly fine time on an unseasonably 55-degree Saturday in Manhattan.

Such an awesome puzzle! I was wondering if anyone else was bothered that all of these is a truly shortened word (as in cut off) except one: SRTA.

TILDE and TILED was a tempting rabbit hole.

Such a fun META! And a 9 letter verb as a solution. WOW!

My only nit, similar to last week: I wish the title would have matched the verb tense of the solution; e.g., "short change" instead of "shortchanged". A small nit for an otherwise masterfully fun puzzle.

Aragorn wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:16 am TILDE and TILED was a tempting rabbit hole.

As was "Manor" and the clue for39A "Minor".

I leapt over the obvious and headed straight for various permutations of the letters removed to form the abbreviations, goaded on by the fact that the clues also contained abbreviations:
Fortunately, the fog lifted quickly.

I parsed the title as “the short grid words are changed (around)”

Arguably the grid’s Most Valuable Player is ABBR, which plays three distinct roles. Right off the bat, it implicates abbreviations in the solve, partly due to its location in the southeast corner – a favorite spot for endogenous nudges. Thus we are encouraged to assemble the abbreviations we have already noticed, but then we wonder what to do with them. Meanwhile, ABBR is itself one of the abbreviations it compels us to collect, contributing its own letter to the solution. That is ABBR’s second role. Then gets a little tricky. We find we are looking at a pretty motley collection of abbreviations: One (AGR) has only three letters, while the rest have four; one (SRTA) is made of non-consecutive letters from its long form, while all the others are made of the first four letters (in order) of the long form; and then there is ETAL, which is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase whose tail could have two or three letters. It is tempting to view it as a hodge-podge. A little unexpected assistance is offered by SRTA: As we look at the collection of entries and their lopped-off tails, SRTA pretty much eliminates trying to do anything with the tails, since SRTA doesn’t even have a missing tail. Okay, maybe we should focus on the five “congruent” entries, each one comprised of four letters and missing a four-letter tail; maybe those other “different” entries aren’t part of the mechanism. That would make things deliciously uniform. So what to do? The key to that riddle is of course ABBR again. In its third role, ABBR focuses attention on Short, the first half of the title. Shortchanged is a compound word that has a meaning all its own (and gives a final click for the solution), but when you separate the compound word’s two components, you can arrive at an entirely different meaning that points to the solution. In some contexts, Short is a synonym for Abbreviation, as in “short for hospital”. In the bifurcated title, replace Short with this synonym and you get Abbreviation Changed. Well, whaddya know. Let’s change those abbreviations and see what happens. A simple way to change an entry is to rearrange the letters. (And now we again can consider all nine, because the formats and tails don’t matter anymore – just each entry’s letters.) Start with COLO. Hmmm, didn’t I see Cool somewhere among the clues? Then Whoosh! What an amazingly imaginative mechanism. Hats off to Mr. Shenk et al. for putting these masterpieces together for all to enjoy.

The elegance of this meta reminded me of Chris Nolan's movie The Prestige which I watched for the nth time on my flight back to the US last week (highly recommend it if you have never watched it). Every magician relies on 3 basic acts for their tricks: you first start with The Pledge where the magician shows you something ordinary, like a dove (and here MS does that by leading us to ABBR as the key clue); the second act is The Turn where the magician takes the dove and makes it do something extraordinary, like disappear (and for the meta we searched all abbreviations in the clues). And finally the 3rd act, The Prestige, where the magician tops the disapperance by making the dove reappear (and just like that, the abbreviations in the meta reappeared as anagrammed words). All in all it was a relatively simple meta, but its beauty was in the elegance and cleanliness of its construction.
Magic and metas are all about structure, and more often than not, MS, MG and PB take us from the ordinary, to the extraordinary and finally to the astounding.

Here's a bit of pedantry or nitpickery. In ETAL, only the AL is an abbreviation. (I heard a prof. point this out in a lecture years ago, and I've never forgotten it.)

Mister Squawk wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 5:08 am I leapt over the obvious and headed straight for various permutations of the letters removed to form the abbreviations, goaded on by the fact that the clues also contained abbreviations:

I spent an hour or so doing this too. Also tried to make anagrams from the grid abbreviations to get abbreviations for coins of the world (from "short" and "changed"). This turned out to be the accidental path to the right solution. Don't think I'd have solved this one if I hadn't divven into that rabbit hole.

Relic wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:19 am

Aragorn wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:16 am TILDE and TILED was a tempting rabbit hole.

As was "Manor" and the clue for39A "Minor".

I was derailed at the start by noting that changing the C of MASC to a T results in MAST, an alternate answer to 54D. So I kept trying to change a letter in each and find the clue it fit.

AGR becomes AIR, or even AER, which is already in the grid
MASC becomes MAST for 54D, easy one.
COLO becomes COLD or maybe POLO, though not sure where those match clues
ECON becomes ETON, a very common crossword answer, though not in this one
NAUT can become HAUT, my favorite French cuisine
HOSP is, of course, HOST, which could have multiple meanings
ABBR becomes ABER, the German word for "but," so maybe 8D, but that's one of the abbreviations, so... I guess not.
But SRTA...? Is ORTA another star in Lyra?

Morning coffee, and a look at how HOSP becomes POSH got me on the right track.

I think this might have been a case where cryptic crossword solvers had an advantage. In cryptic clues, "short" and "changed" are common indicators for abbreviations and anagrams, respectively. With this puzzle, once you'd noticed the abbreviations among the grid entries, the puzzle title both helped confirm you were on the right path and pointed you in the right direction with what to do next.

cheekumbaldy wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:07 am Such an awesome puzzle! I was wondering if anyone else was bothered that all of these is a truly shortened word (as in cut off) except one: SRTA.

Sometimes these things bother me, but then I remember that crosswords have, by their very nature, multiple options for each answer, and you have to determine which one fits best given all the constraints. For example FIN is a viable "Bus. Sch. Class" but it doesn't fit as well as ECON. Applying the logic to the meta, I could leave out SRTA, and get ICTIMIZE, but that led me to include it. Same for ETAL (which isn't "a" word).

No denying Mr. Shenk’s Shortchanged puzzle was a bit of a challenge, so much so that your Rabbit didn’t get much to work with regarding tales of Muggles lost at sea. Whatever the reason, it was certainly admired for its construction – and that’s a good thing.

So for only the second time since beginning his reviews your Rabbit has chosen to resort to a trivia quiz. No prizes but lots of bragging rights.

Identify the following movies that have been shortchanged - not by abbreviations, but by acronyms of their titles.
(A couple of hints: Words like “the”, “of”, “it”, etc. are all accounted for in the acronyms. As an additional bit of help,
the year each movie was released is in parenthesis.) Answers tomorrow. Good luck!

B: OTUVOI (2014)

IAMMMMW (1963)

TBOTRK (1957)

NCFOM (2007)

EEAAO (2022)

ESOTSM (2014)

TCCOBB (2008)

OFOTCN (1975)

TRACTRAC (1966)

WAOVW (1966)

Joe Ross wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 6:13 pm

MarkWoychick wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 6:12 pm Needed some help to get there, but I'm ashore now. My excuse is that I was in Minneapolis this weekend to celebrate my brother's 60th birthday. Here's the proof - me and some of my siblings at LynLake Brewery

That's a herd.

My herd, minus my Irish-twin sister, plus a brother-in-law at right.

The XWord Rabbit wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 6:50 pm rsz_rabbitabides.jpg

No denying Mr. Shenk’s Shortchanged puzzle was a bit of a challenge, so much so that your Rabbit didn’t get much to work with regarding tales of Muggles lost at sea. Whatever the reason, it was certainly admired for its construction – and that’s a good thing.

So for only the second time since beginning his reviews your Rabbit has chosen to resort to a trivia quiz. No prizes but lots of bragging rights.

Identify the following movies that have been shortchanged - not by abbreviations, but by acronyms of their titles.
(A couple of hints: Words like “the”, “of”, “it”, etc. are all accounted for in the acronyms. As an additional bit of help,
the year each movie was released is in parenthesis.) Answers tomorrow. Good luck!

B: OTUVOI (2014)

IAMMMMW (1963)

TBOTRK (1957)

NCFOM (2007)

EEAAO (2022)

ESOTSM (2014)

TCCOBB (2008)

OFOTCN (1975)

TRACTRAC (1966)

WAOVW (1966)

This was fun! And wouldn't you know it? One of my favorites on the list is the absolute last one that I got.

wow, I'm shocked I actually got all those without Googling.

I got slightly hung up by the answers that weren't strictly one word with the end lopped off. I discounted SRTA and also ETAL, and plain didn't see MASC when I was scanning the grid, so I ended up with TIMIZE. And I thought, "OK, that's definitely the end of a verb. It must be the ending which is lopped off a common abbreviation, and I must be able to find its anagram in the grid."

That obviously didn't work out too well, and I kind of back-solved that VICTIMIZE must be what he was going for, and then seeing the V in VEGA got me back on track.

Identify the following movies that have been shortchanged - not by abbreviations, but by acronyms of their titles.

Fun! I got all but the last one, which I may need to sleep on.