/hʌnikom pʌzəl/—Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur SpecGram Vol CXCI, No 4 Contents

Out of Character

Elizabeth Cash

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.


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          
64             65     66  67                   
68             69             70             
71             72             73             
Across

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-European language

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

Down

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 FishKeith SlaterJang Seo-Joon

/hʌnikom pʌzəl/Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur
SpecGram Vol CXCI, No 4 Contents