New York Times, Tuesday, December 22, 2015

This puzzle was created roughly a year ago. Therefore, the message hidden in the twelfth row (highlighted below in green) is as seasonally appropriate now as it was during the puzzle's creation.

There's a lot I appreciate about Jim (Horne), and one aspect that continues to amaze me is how differently we see puzzles. I missed some aspects of this puzzle the first time around, and it wasn't until Jim and I talked shop that I started to really appreciate it. Tom uses a great revealer — SINGULAR — to mean "a term used in the SINGULAR." But he also uses the second definition of SINGULAR — atypical — to describe four words rarely used in their singular form.

PAJAMA PARTY is the perfect example. This is a widely used phrase, and when else are you going to say "pajama" in the singular (besides PAJAMA TOP or BOTTOM)? Same goes for SCISSOR KICK. (Well, there's SCISSOR LIFT (mechanical engineering) the SCISSOR COUP (bridge, or course!), the SCISSOR GRIP (wrestling), but none of these pop quite as much as SCISSOR KICK.)

Jim and I still disagree on TROUSER PRESS. I admit my knowledge of clothing is poor, but PANTS PRESS sounded like the more common term. Google sides with Jim, with many more hits for TROUSER PRESS, and on Amazon.com, they have a "trouser press" section … but most of the products are listed as "pants presses." Hmm.

I would say I need a new "lens for my sunglasses," not a new "sunglass lens," but I can see people saying both. Anyway, fun to discuss these issues.

I usually really admire Tom's math/sci bent. The clue for SUM looked too confusing, though, and I skipped it. Thankfully I went back to it to decipher its meaning! What the clue is trying to say is that if you want to SUM the numbers from 1 to n, you can use a formula: n*(n+1)/2. For example, the SUM of the numbers from 1 to 100 = (100*101)/2 = 5050.

There's a famous myth about the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss — one of his teachers wanted to keep him occupied and gave him the task of adding the numbers from 1 to 100. Gauss supposedly finished in minutes, using mathematical reasoning. Pretty darn cool.

So, a lot of interesting aspects to this puzzle, with some nice bonus fill in LEAP SECOND, I THINK I CAN, etc.

Since Jeff called me out, let me try to defend myself and this theme. English is full of amusing curiosities, and one of the curiouser is that some nouns exist only in plural form (you can't use a scissor or wear a pajama, a sunglass, or a trouser) yet when they're used as adjectives, they are singular. Why? It's a mystery. And like most amusing curiosities of English, it makes for a fine word puzzle theme.

If math puzzles are more your thing, proving that integers from 1 to n sum to n(n+1)/2 is a fun challenge. Try drawing pictures. You'll get a nice Aha moment when you realize why it works.