Our editor ran into the middle of a heated argument in the puzzle room. “You have too many letters in some of your answers!” “No, you have too few in yours!” We’re already behind schedule on this issue, so that sounds good enough on average. We’d like to say that this is out of character, but the unabashedly declining quality of the output from our puzzle department has been a thorny issue lately. Why, they probably didn’t even bother to note which answers use variant forms or more than one word.
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1. Modality of truth
6. Weaponry
10. Gies who hid Anne Frank
14. Feminine name from Semitic for night
15. Animal flesh
16. –
17. '
19. Horse’s manner of movement
20. Pinellas county city, to locals
21. Mixture in 29-Across, or thick painting style
23. Carp
24. Arcsecant or arcsecond, for short
27. Tolkien tree being
28. Linguist Zentella, or Japanese airline
29. Indo-
32. Own goals, or original gangsters
35. Wing, or in the style of
36. Inventor of this thing
38. Fermented dairy product
41. Red in 29-Across
43. So be it
44. Sprout city
46. French crumb used in obsolete negations
48. Integer in some languages, or you in Maltese
49. Pied Piper’s location
51. UTC equivalent, approximately
54. Polloi preceder
56. Dimensions
57. Portuguese or Spanish river
58. Broadway and film star of Anything Goes
62. The only things theoretical linguists won’t publish!
64. Outer layer of some fruits
65. Swindlers
68. Great Lake
69. Knievel
70. Small box in a larger figure
71. Letter’s first word?
72. Crataegus, or Suites by Wyndham
73. Pain, like an Into the Woods song
1. Where Iñupiaq is spoken
2. Electron or muon, e.g.
3. Where Amharic is spoken
4. Female name, like linguist Lehiste
5. Typha, or the trailing part of a feline
6. I love in 29-Across
7. Single exercise, or Congresscritter
8. Half a serving of Hawaiian fish?
9. Science and related fields
10. Co-host of The Vocal Fries Pod
11. Any port ___
12. Alter text
13. Language of Afghanistan
18. Travel plaza
22. Phnom ___
25. Abbreviation for each, or Old English river
26. Ling 101 and others
30. US tax agency
31. Mister
33. Prescriptivist grammarian Nevile
34. Indonesian cent, or Esperanto without
35. Cadillac model, or some prepositions
37. Dubai country
38. Abandoned “inconspicuous” Qatari village
39. Vase for the deceased
40. Kievan Rus’
42. Aquatic salamander, or Dutch elm
45. Thin wedge
47. Resistance to change
50. He in Esperanto, or Chinese unit of distance
51. Fat(ty) in 29-Across
52. Half of what one little kitten lost
53. Pleasantly warm, like bread
55. John Bercow command
58. Poorly advised English king
59. Mud
60. Indonesian province
61. Science TV show
63. Tolkien object
66. Preceder of Hampshire or Zealand
67. German tenor horn
If you can complete the crossword and send your solutions to the editors of SpecGram by April 1, 2022, 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: AskJeeves, decennium, jiggumbob, ephemeral, centenary, theoretic, isolating, vomitives, exceedeth; and the three additional words are: adjective, enumerate, vibrative. For the second puzzle, the nine words are: principal, ochlocrat, slangiest, threnetic, prominent, overthrow, signified, enervated, denseness; and the three additional words are: postposed, cognitive, preterite. Each of the puzzlemeisters below will receive some moderately desirable SpecGram merch:
Vincent Fish •
Keith Slater •
Jang Seo-