New York Times, Thursday, December 20, 2018

It took a while for this one to come together. I was trying to place NONOS in the lower right corner, but I couldn't get it to work. It wasn't until I played with putting it in the center that I came up with the idea of splitting it into NO and NO, thereby not only creating impermissibly short entries, but also impermissibly identical entries. Clear NONOS — perfect!

I first submitted the puzzle with FAULT INSURANCE [Second serve in tennis, essentially], but I hadn't realized that "no-fault" was hyphenated. That entry was deemed inconsistent with the others, and so LAUGHING MATTER was born.

Along the way, I enjoyed chuckling over such options as ROOM TO SWING A CAT [Dance hall with a jazz band?], CHILD LEFT BEHIND ["Home Alone" plot?], and MORE MR NICE GUY [Dr. Jekyll's thwarted goal?].

I also took particular delight in finally working TYPO into a puzzle. I had long ago come up with the clue that I loved [An aye for an eye, say?], and I have been trying to squeeze the word into a puzzle ever since. Of course I'm really glad that the editing team liked my clue — and kept it!

I hope the puzzle gave you an enjoyable break from the rest of life's tumult. Now on with the day!

I love it when constructors break crossword rules, for a purposeful reason. Having two-letter words is a big no-no, so I laughed when encountering the two two-letter words today — NO and NO. Wait! Duplicating words in a grid is another big NO NO. Ha, that's doubly clever!

Humor is so subjective. Removing the NOs from famous phrases wasn't quite a LAUGHING MATTER for me, as the results weren't different enough from their base phrases. I get that they are opposite because they're missing the NO. But MAN IS AN ISLAND was the only one where meanings vastly changed. I liked Ruth's original themers much better, especially ROOM TO SWING A CAT!

(There have been two recent puzzles riffing on NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, so I would have loved to see more space between those and today's.)

I'm not a huge fan of trying to go down to low word counts for Thursday puzzles. I get why Will encourages this — it makes the puzzle much harder to solve, which is appropriate for a Thursday — but the price of ANCY ALEE ANON SST NHRA SYST YSER ROOD … no laughing matter, indeed.

I did appreciate the bonuses of SCENIC AREA and FINEST HOUR. RACE DAY and ON A WHIM, too. But breaking up FINEST HOUR at the S might have been a finer choice, allowing for cleaner gridwork. I bet it'd also allow for some more jazziness in the AMOUNTS and LARGEST slots.

It's a neat concept, breaking not just one but two crossword rules, perfectly. I would have liked more audacity in the theme though — perhaps taking out NOs from middles of entries in more surprising ways? And a little less audacity in the gridwork.

Two-letter answers were common in Margaret Farrar's day. They disappeared from the NYT crosswords in 1952, until Patrick Merrell broke the two-letter ban and nine other rules in this memorable 2004 puzzle. Joe Krozel gave us eight two-letter State abbreviations in 2008. In 2014, Peter A. Collins's Mother's Day grid art required four two-letter entries.