New York Times, Monday, July 17, 2023

A while back the words "oh, I see" came up in a conversation with a friend, which made me think about phrases that could be texted as a series of letters akin to O-I-C. Despite my lack of familiarity with the idea of grammagrams — words or phrases that can be phonetically expressed as a sequence of letters — I was quickly enamored with the concept. "Sea anemone"(C-N-M-N-E) was a fast favorite.

Eventually, after walking through the alphabet a few times, I landed on the caring grammagram "are you okay" (R-U-O-K) and set off to find phrases with the bigrams RU and OK in the correct order. As a longtime UCLA basketball fan, I would have loved to fit RUSSELL WESTBROOK in. I hope the final puzzle makes for a fun solve!

Congrats to Alexander, who recently was named a Fulbright Scholar! While it's impressive that 62 Fulbright alumni have received a Nobel Prize, how many have published three NYT crosswords?

"Embedded letters" puzzles are a crossword favorite, so it takes an extra layer or even two to merit consideration. ARE YOU OKAY = RU OK works perfectly phonetically, and it's such common textese that riffing on it is A-OK.

What makes this example stand out above so many others is that it's tough to find great phrases with this pair of digrams. It'd be much easier if Alexander relaxed the constraint, allowing R U O K to be anywhere within a phrase, and I'm glad he didn't. That would have required circling all four letters, and that would give away the game immediately. Not only that but check out how few phrases there are with RU and OK (with at least one character between them). Besides the ones Alexander used, I only turned up:

• RUSSELL WESTBROOK
• RUNS AMOK
• RULE BOOK
• JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE
• PRUNING HOOK
• RUG HOOKING

Those last three might be tough asks for poor newbs. Even Russ — who was on the OK City Thunder! — could draw ire from sportsball haters, since he's likely not on a path to the Hall of Fame. (Ask the Westbrick chanters.)

I would have loved to see less ANAT ERST TSE UNI from Alexander, but there are so many great bonuses like BEEF TACO and ULTIMATE, hardly making for a boresome solve. Ah, there was that last BORESOME bit of unfortunate fill, plus a tricky LIENEE … perhaps less trading off of color for cleanliness would be prudent in the future, but overall, I say U R O K to this Monday offering.