Punctuation Matters

Katie Hale, originally from Houston, is a freelance crossword editor now living in London with her husband and 6- and 10-year-old kids. Scott Hogan is a patent attorney from Midland, Mich.

They met through Christina Iverson, a crossword editor at The Times who had previously collaborated with each of them. The theme idea for this puzzle was Katie's. The two laughed a lot in thinking up examples

KATIE: I know I say this about all my puzzles, but this one really is my favorite. I love when a theme falls into place like this while you work through other ideas and end up on a tangent that becomes a great set. Scott is really fun to work with since we have a similar sense of humor. He is so good at exhausting the possibilities of a theme, and he doesn't hold back, on the theory that even crazy ideas can spark something that could end up working. We tend to communicate on our shared docs through comments on each other's entry ideas, and quite often, I just leave a "lol" or an "omg, Scott!"

He took the lead on writing the clues here because I kept letting the word "is" slip in, which we really needed to avoid for it to work. He made them all quotes which gave them a nice consistency, and I think it enhanced the humor significantly.

SCOTT: I'm so excited to have joined forces with Katie Hale on this puzzle! Our mutual mentor (and crossword rockstar) Christina Iverson introduced us by email at some point during her meteoric rise to the NYT editing staff. Having our acceptance email penned by Christina was undeniably cool.

Katie is hilarious to work with. I found the inclusion of DARK HUMOR as one of the longer non-theme entries particularly appropriate because we share a twisted sense of humor — sometimes to our detriment, I think. Our first ever NYT (REJECTED!) submission used funny "bad behavior" phrases like LIFT A FINGERPAINTING [Steal artwork from a kindergarten classroom?]. Another (REJECTED!) submission followed a heckling wine snob at a tasting party and ended with a glass of wine tossed in his face by the up-until-that-moment tolerant host.

Today's theme is largely Katie's brainchild and started with dropping an "S" from words ending in "SS" to make possessives — DRESS CODE became DRE'S CODE [Hip-hop Dr.'s ethos?]. Then, Katie suggested using verb phrases with S-ending verbs in which "apostrophes matter," which I thought was a brilliant parallel to the famous "Let's eat, grandma" example of how commas matter.

You see? Even this puzzle has its roots in a bit of DARK HUMOR.

My son is obsessed with "Grizzy and the Lemmings." I don't get it, but he and his classmates have these hilarious conversations about how much they hate that darn grizzly. BEAR'S IN their collective MIND, indeed, and it's even given me a chance to teach Jake about the different meaning of the word "bear."

I also favored FALLS OUT OF FAVOR, switching meanings from "plummet" to "season after summer." Although I've seen this change of meaning many times before, this particular implementation worked well.

And the coup de grace: such an apt way to conclude this theme: the PUZZLE'S OVER!

BATS FIVE HUNDRED might be confusing to the sportsball-haters out there. Baseball is my least favorite of the major sports, but a friend of mine assures me that "batting five hundred" — getting a hit five hundred out of every thousand at-bats — is a term batted around. Impossible dream, considering that batting even four hundred is extremely rare, but a person can field such dreams.

It was fun to read about the DARK HUMOR that unifies Katie and Scott. Also fun to have AIR GUITAR appropriately next to PLAYS A TRICK.

I wasn't wild about the theme, since there are so many possibilities for an S to be turned into an apostrophe S, plus several of them didn't change meaning much (PLAY as a verb is similar to PLAY as a noun, for instance), but that PUZZLES OVER conclusion gave me many smizes.