New York Times, Thursday, October 27, 2022

This is my first rebus puzzle. It got its start when I thought of BREAK BREAD and JUNK DRAWER together, with that fairly uncommon KD string. I didn't think I had seen this as a reason for a rebus before. I couldn't get JUNK DRAWER to work, so thank goodness socks also have a drawer.

When the editing team asked me to replace one entry, I reached out to Jeff in my quest to make sure I was looking at all the possible replacements. In our conversation, he pointed to one of Matt Ginsberg's, but that's a Schrödinger puzzle, so that's not quite the same mechanism.

I tried to confine the possibilities to phrases that were not sing-song or rhyming, so it was more of a surprise that the two halves of the phrase were only one letter apart. I also didn't want to use entries where one of the words could have the same clue as the whole phrase (sorry, Galileo Galilei). Because the theme answers appeared short, I worked to get more long down entries into the grid.

Leveling up from Wednesday to Thursday NYT crosswords can feel insurmountable. The only rule for Thursdays is that there are no rules. So many people are flummoxed by Schrödinger dualities, letters impossible to write in a black square, or entries that literally require outside the box thinking ... they dejectedly throw in the towel.

Today's puzzle is an excellent gateway into the wonderful Wonderland down the rabbit hole. Some Wednesday solvers have at least heard of rebuses before, and Barbara gently nudges folks into the uncharted, but conquerable territory.

[Eat, quaintly] — wisely italicized for emphasis — can't be BREA(KD). It has to be BREA(K) BREA(D), and the concept's dam breaks open. Some neat finds in (P)OWER (M)OWER and (G)O TOE (T)O TOE.

Although DO(N)'T DO (I)T is short, I admired how non-obvious it was, much harder to suss out that something like (H)OCUS (P)OCUS or K(I)NG K(O)NG.

I also appreciated that Barbara made me curious to see what other possibilities existed. Jim's approach below is great for non-coders. With twenty lines of Python coding, I captured a more complete set, including some neat ones like COMME C(I), COMME C(A), TOMA(Y)TO TOMA(H)TO, SPL(I)SH SPL(A)SH, along with several others that were already featured in Matt's concept. Taking it one step further, I found another set that were in line with Patrick Berry's amped-up execution.

Given that there are hundreds of possibilities, it would have been nice to have some extra layer to help this puzzle stand out. However, Barbara did a nice job of picking out fun examples, and the use of both letters in the Down direction as a rebus square made for a concept that might rocket Wednesday solvers through the sound barrier of crossword soundness. Welcome to the Bizarro World of limitless creativity!

Jeff is right that finding words for this theme is best done by coding, but just for fun, let's try RegEx.

Transformation at the first letter finds POWER MOWER and the old toys ROCKEM SOCKEM and BETSY WETSY,

Changing the last letter gives us TALL TALE and BREAK BREAD, but also QUEEQUEG and SWEEPSWEEK (although the latter doesn't break nicely in half).

Mid-word transformations like DONT DOIT are also possible but harder on our poor web servers.