New York Times, Thursday, January 14, 2016

The humble Spoonerism is such an endless source of wordplay — often unexpected, sometimes wildly funny — that it's no wonder that it has become the inspiration for so many crossword constructors. I presume that my puzzle developed as had many other such puzzles — a random thought "spoonerized" a phrase, and the phrase was intriguing enough to encourage a search for other related phrases. Once I saw that TRAY DIPPER had the same letter count as THE BEATLES, the challenge was irresistible.

I literally looked through a list of every song by the Beatles to find the three remaining Spoonerisms. The viable options, through sheer luck, provided a matching letter-length set, plus a 15-letter center, and I was fortunate that Vivien LEIGH's last name does indeed rhyme with "Lee", not "weigh".

For me, it is interesting that the seed entry here, TRAY DIPPER, is not (in my opinion) the most elegant (I vote for PAPER RACK BITER with its clue), the funniest (SHE'S HEAVING LOAM, I'd say), or most successfully wacky (to me, LEIGH SHOVES YOU) of the theme entries. However, the overall combined result pleased me a great deal, and I hope solvers enjoyed it too.

I like a good spoonerism (swapping beginning sounds of two consecutive words) theme now and again. I appreciate that Jeffrey used a tight set, constraining the themers to songs by THE BEATLES. It's such a shame that THE BEATLES themselves don't spoonerize into something. Now that would have been a coup!

Consistency and tightness bring elegance to crossword themes. Because thousands of word pairs can be spoonerized, it was important for Jeffrey to narrow down the pool — that's tightness, and he did well there.

Consistency ... seeing TRAY DIPPER (Day Tripper) made me want all two-word phrases for the next themers. But then we get SHES HEAVING LOAM (She's Leaving Home) and LEIGH SHOVES YOU (She Loves You), with words left unspoonerized. And then PAPER RACK BITER (Paperback Writer) gets one of its words split before spoonerization. Breaking up a word like that felt pretty odd. All in all, not very consistent.

It also felt strange that SHE was in two themers. Granted, one was shown regularly and one post-spoonerism, but that also felt inelegant.

Tough grid arrangement. It's a nice change of pace to see such a wide-open grid on a weekday — 70 words is a tough task when you're working with so many themers. It's also incredibly difficult to do this while keeping your long fill snazzy and your short fill free of gluey bits.

Jeffrey really challenges himself in the NW and SE corners. That arrangement — three adjacent long answers crossing two themers — is so difficult to execute on. I like Jeffrey's NW corner a lot — LATE PASS, AMARANTH, and PERSPIRE are all pretty good, with some very minor AMES and PST stuff. The SE demonstrates the difficulty of this arrangement, ONLY ONCE not quite feeling in the language to me, and AINT I, ICER, and DEYS needed to hold it together. Even some of us longtime solvers have a tough time keeping REYS, BEYS, and DEYS straight.

I prefer trickier (as opposed to simply harder) Thursday puzzles, but this one did give me a themeless-like workout given all its big swaths of white space.