The Journal of Lockdown Linguistics (International Edition)—Announcement from Panini Press SpecGram Vol CLXXXVII, No 3 Contents

What Does the Fax Say?

Ada Cross and Tad Fox

Normally, our crossword-grid constructor in Chicago faxes a completed grid to the SpecGram puzzle office in Denver, where our ever-changing stable of indistinguishable (and undistinguished) interns fight for the right to be the one who writes the clues. Unfortunately for this month’s lucky winner Ada, the fax machine was broken in the melee, and we haven’t been able to open up a time portal to 1989 to contact the repair guy. Instead, we had to rely on an even older piece of technology, landline phones. We’re sure none of this matters for solving the puzzle, but our test solver noted that eight of the clues seemed weird and suggested that three of the entries may provide a helpful clue as to why.

1  2  3  4  5    6  7  8  9    10  11  12  13 
14                15             16          
17                18           19             
20              21       22                   
23          24        25                   
      26                       27  28  29 
30  31  32                     33  34          
35                36     37    38             
39                  40     41                
42              43                      
      44  45  46                   47  48  49 
50  51  52                53        54          
55                    56       57             
58             59             60             
61             62             63             
Across

1. Strips in blinds

6. Angry speech

10. Hit with an open hand

14. Spot (French)

15. Actor who portrayed character with same last name in La Bamba

16. Bustle, or uncompleted task

17. Loud like a lion

18. Flapped

20. Light (French)

22. Estefan, Gaynor, and Steinem

23. White (Hawaiian)

24. Theme, with 43-Across and 60-Across

26. What the emptor should do

27. Formal way to address a woman (US)

30. High-pitched sibilant

33. Tearful

35. Murder She ______

36. Unix archive utility

38. Crocodile Hunter Steve

39. Famous name in furniture design

40. Like Rudolph

42. Electromagnetic pulse, for short

43. See 24-Across

44. Threatening

47. Enzyme suffix

50. Half a Faulkner novel?

53. Tied a shoe again

55. Trademark, possibly

57. Canadian union of broadcast performers

58. Pastis flavor (French)

59. Great Lake

60. See 24-Across

61. Daybreak

62. Ink, slangily

63. Dictionary entry for a word


 Down

1. Security that comes in shares

2. The road (French), or Marge Simpson’s official last name?

3. New Mexico pueblo

4. Most spoken Kra-Dai language

5. Woos by singing

6. The entity denoted by a word or phrase

7. Sign language used in the US

8. Negating adverb

9. Name of a book

10. Opposite of bow

11. Full House actress Loughlin

12. Classical theaters

13. Cushions, often found under computer mice

19. Craggy hill

21. Wander

25. Of or relating to a particular Turkic language (variant)

26. Acknowledge a scholarly source

27. Cries like a cat

28. Ron Howard character

29. Go (Welsh)

30. Finch that becomes sugary with some T?

31. Trolley (British)

32. Inclined surface

33. Evening drink receptacle

34. Greek god of love

37. Pensioners

41. Eat

43. Chevrolet model

44. Minister’s house

45. Old old, preserved in comparative and superlative forms

46. Group of nine instruments

47. Microfilament protein

48. Peasants

49. You all eat (Lithuanian), or how singles meet during COVID-19?

50. City (combining form, from Persian)

51. Czech city

52. Healthy (French)

54. Dull pain

56. Chomsky’s haunt

If you can complete the crossword and send your solutions to the editors of SpecGram by May 15th, 2020, you could win some SpecGram merch. The correct solution and winners will be announced in the next issue of Speculative Grammarian.

The solutions to last month’s puzzle, Mix & Match ◊, are provided here. The nine 9-letter words from the first puzzle are: spreading, prepended, exception, countable, irritator, fosterage, idiomatic, exoticism, ringworms; and the three additional words are: neologism, specifier, recursion. For the second puzzle, the nine words are: stridency, earwigged, gyrograph, middleman, explosion, necessity, transient, archiving, leukaemia; and the three additional words are: egressive, segmental, diglossia. Each of the puzzlemeisters below will receive some moderately desirable SpecGram merch:

Wayne Zhao • Thorsten Schröter • Joachim Mugdan • Vincent Fish • Keith Slater

The Journal of Lockdown Linguistics (International Edition)—Announcement from Panini Press
SpecGram Vol CLXXXVII, No 3 Contents