New York Times, Tuesday, September 10, 2013

I sifted through all the English words with Chinese roots and came up with the current set. I avoided words with obvious Chinese ties like Mahjong or Feng shui. I also shunned words with controversial origins like Tofu or Ramen.

I found it tricky to work with theme entries of short length. I'm so used to the conventional grids with 4 or 5 long theme entries.

What I like about this puzzle is the unusual nature of the theme. There are no theme answers longer than seven letters. The information in the theme makes you go "huh, I didn't know that," which is nice.

Fun change of pace from C.C. today. She has an interesting story, growing up in China and only starting crosswords back in 2008. Her blog, L.A. Times Crossword Corner, covers the LA Times puzzle on a daily basis. I started doing crosswords back in 2008 as well, but can't imagine doing them in my non-primary language. Very impressive!

Anytime a theme uses shorter theme entries (seven letters or less), it increases the difficulty level for the construction. This is because the word count maximum of 78 stays the same, so the rest of the surrounding fill must be longer than usual. Note the stacks of 7s in the four corners, the 7s in the middle, and ARTICHOKE in the middle. It makes for a quasi-themeless type of filling challenge, incorporating many more seven letter words than usual. On the whole the fill is pretty good, although DCCC and QID show how difficult it can be to get those wide-open corners to work.

Finally, it would have been nice for the theme answers to stand out a bit more, perhaps by isolating them into five rows? That would have made for a extremely challenging construction (and may have called for different themers), but would have made it easier to see afterward which were the words of Chinese origin. As it is, SILK and CHOW blend into the puzzle a little too well (I've highlighted them in the grid so they stand out better). Typically Will likes the theme answers to "pop" and for good reason, but sometimes it just isn't possible. Today's puzzle reasonably trades off "theme pop" for the fact that I found it interesting to learn where these common words came from. Nice work from C.C.