WORDS OF INTRODUCTION

Brendan Emmett Quigley is a professional puzzlemaker in Brookline, Mass. He says he'll make puzzles for pretty much any market that will cut him a check — "not to mention a few others that still owe me money." Brendan sold his first crossword to The Times in 1996, when he was a senior at the University of New Hampshire.

This is his 183^rd puzzle for the paper.

Initialisms, all playing on "___ words." It confused me at first — how could the KOHINOOR DIAMOND possibly be KIND words? Turns out that it can also be written as the KOH-I-NOOR DIAMOND. Huh, who knew?

I appreciate that BEQ stuck steadfastly to only in-the-language phrases. It would have been too easy to stray toward loosey-goosey-ness on something like SAFE words. SUCH A FLIMSY EXAMPLE would have been such a flimsy example of this theme.

Even though I so brilliantly managed to drop it into casual conversation.

Mic drop!

Ah, the sub-140 word Sunday puzzle. I case see why BEQ was tempted (he used 136 words) — if a solver is initialismed out (I suffer from that, I admit), try to give them something to hold their attention. Bonuses like I AM A ROCK, SCORSESE, SHOWCASE, UPSTARTS, iN UTERO, SEE THRU do help.

But ORDO. COMTE. FETOR? EDDA ROARK REUEL. Yikes.

Not to mention YSER ACBC AME and the random XOX.

Now, there was more interesting mid-length stuff than usual, ANKARA, TOFFEE, TROPIC, BALKANS, CRACKER, TOUCANS. Definitely not the same, boring 3-5 letter fill that we see all the time.

But overall, I'd have preferred a 140-word puzzle that featured a couple of sizzling long bonuses, even if that meant accepting more of the same-old, same-old 3-5-letter fill. I tend to not notice that short stuff; it becomes part of the background. Just as with the Japanese adage, "The nail that sticks out gets pounded back down," I favor having as few NONFEE ACBC FETOR nails sticking up.

I'd love to see more creativity in the NYT Sunday crossword. It's felt like it's lost its edge in the past year. Not every Sunday puzzle has to be ground-breaking, nor should it be — plenty of people are just fine with tried-and-true, standard themes, thank you very much.

But especially considering how few people are making Sunday puzzles these days — Will just issued a note saying he only has 10 accepted Sundays in the queue — I'm hoping that Will and Joel start more proactively reaching out to certain constructors and guiding them along the difficult Sunday path, working with them to develop creative themes.

ADDED NOTE: Will recently changed his policy for Sunday puzzles! While he still won't take general theme queries for Sunday puzzles — all other editors do, but due to the sheer volume of his submissions (about 125 per week), Will can't make this happen this yet — he will look at unclued grids. That's a step in the right direction — previously, constructors would have to take the 10+ hours to clue up a 21x21 grid before submitting. It was soul-crushing to then find out that Will didn't like the theme, and those 10 hours were a waste of time.

Samll steps. I'm hoping his next move will be to allow "experienced constructors" — those with 10+ NYT puzzles published, say — to submit Sunday theme queries. Maybe limit it to one a month or something, to make it more manageable.