New York Times, Monday, January 29, 2018

This was an idea that came together fairly quickly once it occurred to me. But it did undergo one major transformation. The obvious first thought was to have small, medium, and large in phrases going down, with the downsizing revealer as the final, fourth entry. But then MUMBO JUMBO came to mind and was too perfect to disregard. That left the revealer for the spot where you find it now.

The grid constraint was that I wanted the size words to go sequentially down the grid as well as just being down entries. Which meant finding answers and placing them such that each keyword was lower than the previous one.

The turnaround on this puzzle was astoundingly fast. I sent it in at the tail end of October and got an acceptance email on January 10. And here it is still January. Maybe a record.

In looking this over, I can see I made some compromises. LASSI, ESSES, and ET ALII, as well as good old IDI, would not be my pick of fill. But that was the best I could do without changing the basic grid design.

Will did make one teeny grid change. At 7-Across, I had BMI rather than TGI. Most clues were unchanged. As I looked them over, I did pause at the one he substituted for PARK, thinking, What the heck is PRNDL? I had to laugh at that one.

Who knew that DOWNSIZE-ing could be fun? I've highlighted the key words to make Lynn's creative take stand out. SMALL to MEDIUM to LARGE to … JUMBO? Hard to find a good phrase hiding the word EXTRA LARGE, I suppose!

Loved SMALL WORLD; great phrase. To me, that was the standout of the four themers. MUMBO JUMBO was the snazziest of the bunch, but JUMBO didn't feel quite right in the size progression. I so badly wanted XL — stupid t-shirt industry with its indoctrination!

(We snooty Seattleites know that the proper term for "ridiculously large" is VENTI.)

PRINT MEDIUM … I'm so used to seeing it in the plural, PRINT MEDIA, that I struggled to stretch MEDIA across those last six boxes. And an AT LARGE RACE does appear to be a phrase in usage, but it didn't roll off my tongue as I said it to myself.

Not as smooth as Lynn's Monday puzzles are. Lynn mentioned many of these already, but kicking off with ET ALII, tough for newbies, some OPEL, LASSI (generally fine, but a lot of possibility to turn off newer solvers), ISA, TGI, both ELLS and ESSES. Oof!

Why so much? This layout is a little unusual — the placement of DOWNSIZE takes up valuable real estate. And check out how SMALL WORLD and PRINT MEDIUM aren't staggered, like adjacent themers usually would be. (PRINT MEDIUM would usually be shoved all the way to the bottom of the puzzle, for better spacing.) That creates problems in the NW corner.

But I did appreciate Lynn's efforts to give some bonuses here and there. MODEL UN was great, as was REDDIWIP and VAMOOSE.

Overall, I felt like Lynn's original idea of just a SMALL MEDIUM LARGE progression, along with DOWNSIZE (perhaps split as DOWN / SIZE across the middle row?) would have made for a tidier Monday puzzle. Neat concept, cool idea that I hadn't seen before — but I wouldn't recommend the puzzle as executed to newbies.