New York Times, Thursday, August 11, 2022

False friends are the reason this puzzle exists. They're pairs of words in different languages that seem related to one another but whose meanings are completely different. So, 'pan' in Spanish isn't related to 'pan' in English, and it doesn't have anything to do with cooking vessels. False friends, in short, looked like one English word but meant another.

In finding theme material for this puzzle, I went through lists of these words, which had been compiled as a caution for language learners, and whenever a false friend and its English meaning formed a valid phrase, I added it. False friends were also invaluable in avoiding the trap of 'redundant' translations, like 'chai tea' (since chai already means 'tea') and the dozens of place names meaning 'river river' or 'hill hill' (look up tautological place names for a very confusing read), plus false cognates, in which two words do have the same meaning, but through pure coincidence rather than sharing a common ancestor.

In all, I'm surprised that this extremely rigid theme had as many valid entries as it did, and especially that almost all had the English and non-English word occur in the same order.

Genius-level find in WITHOUT SIN. I could almost give the puzzle a POW! on that single themer alone. It's so rare that I'm astonished by a discovery — to have a common phrase composed of an English word plus its Spanish translation? Sin comparación!

(If you ever travel to a Spanish-speaking area, the phrases "sin gas" and "con gas" for fizzy and still water are useful.)

The others didn't impact me nearly as strongly because I haven't had the fortune to travel to any Czech, German, or Dutch-speaking countries or befriend a native speaker. For the sake of completion, I did look up the translations of GUEST, THE, and FIRE, and they indeed are HOST, DIE, and BRAND in those languages, respectively.

Additionally, BREADPAN didn't feel as in-the-language as the sizzling FIREBRAND. Turns out it's a commonplace kitchen item — not a surprise that my second-grade-level baking skills failed me yet again.

THE DIE is difficult to justify as a standalone phrase; a verboten six-letter partial ("The die is cast"). I can forgive the infelicity in the name of an innovative concept, though, because there can't be many phrases that could fit into this theme. Creative way to symmetrically incorporate THE / DIE into the grid, too.

It's hard to imagine how even to approach finding these types of phrases — I felt compelled to sit down and think about how David did it (I still have no idea). If the others had struck me even half as strongly as WITHOUT SIN, this would have been a puzzle of the year candidate.