New York Times, Thursday, December 22, 2022

For themes that involve breaking up long words, I prefer when the resulting short words are legitimate, so I brainstormed theme answers with this constraint in mind. Getting ROUNDABOUT ROUTE to run through the four thematic arrangements might just top the list of lucky moments in my crossword construction career.

I decided to clue all the short words since I figured having 12 unclued answers might make for a frustrating solving experience. I thought this puzzle might run on a Wednesday, given the lack of resistance that the unclued short words would have provided, though I'm always happy to be published on my favorite day of the New York Times Crossword week.

How many distinct entries can you make using the starting trigram of CAR? At least twelve, as it turns out! David provides them all in a ROUNDABOUT ROUTE. For example, 5-Down can produce CAR(PETS), CAR(ETS), and CAR(DING), depending on which exit you take.

The paths confused me — wouldn't you pick up all the letters as you go, like CAR(DING) should follow the path of CAR+P+E+DING as you drive around the black square?

Then I figured, this American DING-a-ling should stop CAR+P+ING, given that we're still stuck in the stone ages with ridiculous four-way stops.

Neat how David applied symmetry, two CARs appearing forward, and two backward as RAC. That further accentuated the ROUNDABOUT nature of the theme.

Cool that several entries had to appear in the grid as regular words. The PETS in CAR(PETS) shows up as STEP, while in the upper right corner, both TONS in CAR(TONS) and OMED in CAR(OMED) innocuously show up as SNOT and DEMO. Elegant touch to have nothing (except RAC) give away the game.

It's so difficult gridding around four-part themers, and when they're short, that means that your fill must be long — to stay under the 78-word minimum, something has to be long. Brilliant fill, so much SANTA HAT, ANGELINA's clever etymology clue, DERELICT, SUNK COSTS … David was not at all SITting ONE OUT. AMBROSIA to my ears.

Not picking up all the letters around the ROUNDABOUTs still bugs me. Still, there is something insidery about how CAR(DING) cuts the corner, just like some annoying drivers do around our lone neighborhood ROUNDABOUT. Don't get me started on the guy who drives straight over it in his SUV — CAR(OMED) is right!

I liked this puzzle more than Jeff did, because we made different assumptions about the theme. He imagined the black squares to be the center of roundabouts that drivers had to drive around, so they had to hit the additional letters that the car passed through. In my mind, each black square was the whole roundabout, including the traffic lanes, so the puzzle worked perfectly for me. I added some small circles to the grid to demonstrate how I saw things.