MARK MY WORDS

Like most Sundays I've made, this puzzle started as two ideas that merged together. I really liked the idea of having the same squares serve as quotation marks and ditto marks, but I thought it needed something else to tie it together. The "something else" came along when my professor Ryan Bennett mentioned the adjacent pairs of double letters in "bookkeeper" as an aside in an intro linguistics class.

At first I considered having the theme entries be types of titles that require quotation marks rather than underlining — e.g., the set of themers could include a poem, a song, a speech, a book chapter, an episode of a TV show, and a short story. I ended up picking the quotation approach instead because quotations seemed more fun than titles.

I've been experimenting lately with getting the word count down on Sundays. I still can't decide if I prefer low-word-count grids with more fill that is interesting but also more fill that is questionable, or if I prefer very clean but not as interesting 140-worders. I'll probably settle somewhere between the two extremes.

The quote mark is the same as an editor's ditto mark, which means to "repeat what's seen above." So Tom interprets these symbols as quote marks in the across direction, and ditto marks in the down, indicating that the letter above should be repeated.

An example: "OPEN SESAME" sits at 29-Across, including the open and close quotes. The crossing answer at 4-Down looks bizarre as CHED"AR, but the ditto mark tells you to repeat the D above. Thus, the double-D completes CHEDDAR.

Whew!

Took me a long time to catch on, and even then, I didn't recall how a ditto mark worked. I bet this puzzle will play super-strongly to the editing crowd, less so to those of us whose last experience with ditto marks came in high school.

I really enjoyed some of the Tom-ness we've come to see in his body of work. Kicking it off with (I AM NOT) SPOCK and OH CRUD is great. HULK SMASH! and MY PRECIOUS in the themers also made me smile. And the crazy word SUBBOOKKEEPER with its quadruple set of double-letters right down the middle — I wasn't familiar with the word, and it looks a bit made-up, but what a cool find.

I read Tom's comments about low word-count experimentation with great interest. Going down to 132 words is an incredibly difficult task, and Tom is one of the few people I think are equipped to handle it. Such a low word count does make for a tough-to-solve, wide-open puzzle filled with a lot of mid-length (6 or 7 letters) entries. Some of them I loved: KARAOKE, AMSCRAY, I SWEAR, PTOLEMY, NO MERCY. Along with longer entries like FIG LEAVES and CUE STICKS, that's a lot of solving goodness.

But it comes with trade-offs. Some of the ones I didn't care for: REROSE, INCANT, TRYERS, IN A BAR, SOWER, CHEMIC, UNMEET, not to mention the fine but not super interesting GAIN ON, NEARER TO, RUSH AT entries made longer just by prepositions.

I personally prefer just a few great entries with fewer gluey bits, much more commonly seen in 140 word puzzles. But the variety from week to week is a good change of pace.