34 thoughts on “LA Times Crossword 16 Jul 20, Thursday”

  1. No errors .. About 30 minutes… Yay for me given it was a Wechsler!!

    ONOMATOPOEIA!!! What a word, wow!!! It sounds fun. I had to do a Google to hear the pronunciation.. Funny. Who or how did that word come to fruition? The same people that sit in a room and come up with these drug names??

    There are some pretty smart English history people on this blog. I hope one of them can explain the history of ONOMATOPOEIA!!

    Fun puzzle. Be safe.

  2. @Mr. Mike, onomatopoeia is a great word for a crossword puzzle – the spelling is pretty different, right? 🙂 The English spelling of it mimics closely the Greek spelling, kind of explaining the oddness. It means making a sound like something else, oink like a pig, woof like a dog, tick-tock like a clock, etc. The really interesting thing about it is that different cultures apply different sounds to the same item. Wikipedia has a picture of a clock in the window of a store in Italy and the handwritten sign on it says “No Tic Tac”, meaning they say “tack” instead of “tock”. I have a friend who moved here from Iran in the ’80s who often notices these differences.

    Be safe, all.

    1. Forgot to put in that it comes from the Greek, “onoma” for name, and “poi” for “to make”, which is also the root of “poet”.

  3. Put in ‘Dam’ instead of DOE, but considering the crosses I don’t feel as bad as I should.
    Passing thoughts (only my opinions):
    My paper headlined the crossword by saying that it honors the 75th anniversary of the Mystery Writers of America – oops!
    🍕 Crusts are the best part, I’d never leave one behind.
    Could only think of the Chuck Berry hit when I saw the 40A clue.
    52A’s desk was recently in the news, apparently NJ guv (disowned?) it a few weeks ago, perhaps suspicious of some thoughts the desk may be harboring after all these years.

  4. I can only assume that crossword writers were delighted when “bae” came into popular usage…..

  5. 8:39, no errors. I just knew knowing how to spell that word would come in handy some day! … 😜

    My family owned a Reader’s Digest anthology of Poe’s stories. I remember staying up late one evening, as an eight- or nine-year-old, reading some of them (including “The Telltale Heart”) and then having nightmares all night. A strange person … (not me … Poe … 😜).

    1. One more random comment: I’m still waiting for “borborygmus” to appear in a crossword puzzle … and I can still spell it! How long, O Lord, how long? … 🤪

  6. Screwed up the top right corner because I had “tecano” instead of
    “techno” so that messed up a lot. I knew the answer to 40 across
    because of English lit classes but had to look up the spelling. Great
    word “onomatopoeia”! Choo choo!

  7. Funny the connections the brain refuses to make sometimes: yesterday I could see Sam and Rick and Ingrid but not think of Ilsa; today I could see Warren and Dustin but not think of Ishtar….. Movie clues that start with I? 29D — Haha — for sure

    1. @Anonymous

      As a lapsed Catholic the best I come up with is “inri” was affixed to the actual cross, where it meant — because in the Roman alphabet i and j were interchangeable — Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews; “ihs” (in hoc signo) means “by this sign” and relates more to a crucifix.

  8. 12:19 Thanks to Bill for helping me understand the theme. Like @ChrisC, I also thought of Chuck Berry for 40A. I needed crosses to spell ONOMATOPOEIA correctly. I am familiar with the word and its meaning – just a bit vague on the spelling. Looking at it further, I thought, can’t we just put a U in there so that all 5 vowels are in a string? A Google search came up with (as a minimum) IOUEA (a genus of sea sponge) and MIAOUED – what we would more typically spell as MEOWED.

  9. Had to Google 3, all 3 letters long: OED – I thought it was to be a venerable referee, so was it ORR or OTT?
    Thought Nov honoree had to be Columbus.
    Finally, LIU. I admit I forget Long Island is part of NYS, and I have seen my state pictured without LI! My sister is married to a fellow from LI, as was her previous boyfriend. Thus, she always called LI “The Guyland.”
    I admit not actually knowing: STROH, the spelling of ONOMATOPOEIA, ISHTAR, Kate Brown, GO NOW.

    @Clay – this is called TOT (Tip of Tongue) forgetfulness, and I’ve been told it isn’t Alzheimer’s related.

  10. 32:05 with 2 dumb errors…I didn’t pick up the theme at all…This was IMO much tougher than the NYT0611 from my paper today.
    @Nonny…let’s split the difference and say you and Poe.
    Stay safe y’all

    1. Okay, Jack, it’s a deal … 😜.

      And, speaking of strange … I’m at the turnaround point in my latest trash-collecting expedition and I just found about a dozen old coconuts beside a railroad track. I don’t think coconuts are native to Colorado and they don’t look quite old enough to have washed up on the shores of some primordial sea. I shall probably have to be content with not knowing how they came to be there, but I can’t help but be reminded of a great line from a Monty Python movie (to be spoken with an English accent): “Are you saying that coconuts are migrátory?”

  11. Detective story? POE?! Maybe I have him confused with horror writer Arthur Conan Doyle.

    1. @Anonymous

      It’s true. He wrote three of them in the early 1840s, starting with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Unfortunately the killer in this story (spoiler alert!) bizarrely turned out to be an orangutan, one of the most unaggressive and mild-mannered of all the primates.

  12. Another fun one from the Wechsler. Kudos. And it’s refreshing to see that nobody (yet) complained about the 66 across clue, Fencing blades. Well done.

  13. I agree with LuLu. Especially liked 65A “What might take a while?” a clever variation for the ever-present ERST.

  14. 12 mins 57 sec, no errors. Gotta give credit where credit it due… any puzzle that can have ONOMOATOPOEIA shoehorned into it can be classified as “clever”.

  15. Tough (for me) but enjoyable and helps dealing with this never ending confinement we are experiencing . I got to admit BAE
    threw me.

    Eddie

  16. You cannot help but love a puzzle with the answer to 40A. Thanks go to my 9th, 10th and 11th grade English teachers way back when. Then, to have one of the answers be a hometown brew for me. Well, how great is that?

  17. 10:18 1 error

    Really enjoyed the theme. I especially love that POE is in ONOMATOPOEIA, as one of the great examples of sound words in English is Poe’s own “The Bells.”

    If you like onomatopoeia, look into Japanese. The language has two classes of onomotopoeia: giongo, in which the sound of the word imitates an actual sound, and gitaigo, in which the sound of the word expresses a feeling or other effect.

    For example, gorogoro can mean a cat’s purr, a rock rolling down a hill, or thunder. Wakuwaku means feeling excited or happy about something good about to happen.

    1. @Pam in MA

      The fifth basic taste alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter — the Japanese “umami” for savory — occasionally shows up in crossword puzzles. Could this too be an onomatopoeia as in “um um good”?

      1. The oft-quoted Campbell’s Soup slogan is, “Mmm-mmm good”. “Um” is used to express hesitation in vocal expression.

  18. Fun puzzle. The Edgars are an award handed out by the Mystery Writers of America. Tony Hillerman, author of the Navajo Tribal Police mysteries, was both a past recipient and a past president. Those are among my favorite books.

  19. @Nonny, I don’t want to reread the whole thing, but I think you had the fastest time.

    As for us today, DNF. Less than half on just one of those days.

    Stay safe, everybody. We in Louisiana are under a mandate to wear masks when
    entering buildings, but not everybody is paying attention to the mandate. I guess
    our state cases will just keep on spiking.

  20. Any native English speaker who uses “umami” instead of “savory” is just a pretentious food snob.

    Bill, re: 52A – The university in Baltimore is Johns (with an “s”) Hopkins.

  21. Very enjoyable Thursday Wechsler; took me 32 minutes with no errors. I could see where everything was going pretty early on, it just took a little while to cross all my Ts and dot all my Is.

    Just had to change SPla.. before seeing it was going to be SPARSE and sounded out aNaMATOPOEIA, before fixing that with crosses. Even though I just read about WILSON it took me a few minutes to remember. Also took a few minutes to remember MONDRIAN’s first name.

  22. Hi every buddy!!🦆

    OMG I spelled ONOMATOPOEIA right with no crosses…..and without having yet gotten the theme – so I’m proud!!! 🤗 Did have to cheat elsewhere, however- I had KIM instead of LEE so had to cheat for PEA. 😆 And I couldn’t get ON A RIDGE at first cuz I had GET instead of GOT. Forgot to notice that the clue was in the past tense!! Jeez.

    Nicely done puzzle.

    Baseball starts next week!! Let’s see how that works out. Spring training in July!! Times are strange. A coupla Dodgers were saying that they miss the crowd noise, cuz when it’s too quiet everyone can hear the trash talk 😆

    Be well~~🍺

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