New York Times, Monday, March 27, 2017

For the past few years, I've been a member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (YGDP), which studies how grammar varies across dialects. The idea for this puzzle came when I was researching the for the YGDP; I'd been looking for a way to use the interpretation of STAKEOUT as S-TAKEOUT, and seeing the phrase ALLS I KNOW gave me an idea of how to do it.

When people think about dialectal variation, they usually think in terms of which words are available (e.g., whether you say soda or pop) and in terms of pronunciation (e.g. whether you pronounce caught and cot the same or differently). The YGDP studies a third type of dialectal variation, namely grammatical variation. An example of this is with the word anymore: In most dialects, anymore typically has to follow a negative word such as not ("Gas is not expensive anymore"), but in some dialects it can occur without a negative word ("Gas is really expensive anymore"). This usage is called positive , and it's pretty common where I'm from (the Pittsburgh area).

This puzzle touches on one of the core beliefs of most linguists--namely, that non-standard linguistic features such as "alls I know" should be embraced rather than disparaged. Language naturally varies across speakers and across time, and if you ignore its fluidity you miss much of its beauty. For a better explanation of this viewpoint, check out the op-ed "Our Language Prejudices Don't Make No Sense" by Raffaella Zanuttini.

A sincere thank you to all the members of the YGDP, both for inspiring this puzzle and for being such a big part of my undergraduate career!

STAKEOUT parsed as S TAKE OUT, i.e. take out S's people tend to colloquially toss in. That first themer threw me for a loop — do people actually say ALLS I KNOW? (It does look cool as ALL SIK NOW.) But the other themers gave me a smile, especially HOWS ABOUT, which I use all the time. Fun concept.

Nice start to the grid, kicking it off with two Xs, so smoothly worked in. Along with YES MAAM, that's the way you want to start your puzzle! We do get an AMO soon after, but that's one I can easily overlook since it's a lone dab of glue in that region. (Solvers that are TYROS (newbs) could easily disagree, though — I bet AMO is odd Latin to some.)

As a 16x15 puzzle — wider than normal — it's expected that there will be 2-3 more words than in a regular 15x15. With a wide puzzle, some of us constructors stubbornly stick to the usual word maximum of 78, and I'm glad that Tom let his word count rise to 81.

Why? Because it's surprisingly hard to get down to 78 words or less in a 16x15 without compromising smoothness in fill, and I value smoothness so highly in Monday puzzles. Instead of little regions that are 3-5 letters wide, you tend to get ones that are 6 letters wide, like the upper right. Those are so much more difficult to fill than 5-wides.

Now, I don't like it when a puzzle goes to a high word count by eliminating interesting long fill, but that's not the case here. Tom is as good as ever with his long fill, highlighted by LUCKY YOU, TOP HEAVY, ODDS ARE …, TOO SOON?, IMPROV. If I can get this many nice bonuses, with so few dabs of ugly crossword glue, I don't care at all that the puzzle is technically 3 words above the max.

This felt like a tough theme to grok for a Monday — and I just couldn't imagine a stickler grammarian saying "S take out!" — but I like the innovative thinking. Some great examples of that colloquial extra S, too.