Dominick Talvacchio author page
1 puzzle by Dominick Talvacchio
with Constructor comments
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I'm delighted to have this crossword appear in the New York Times. I'd like to thank Will and the other editors for helping to bring the puzzle into shape, and especially for having the good sense to nix a theme entry which had so endeared itself to me that I willfully overlooked the absurd difficulty in parsing it: OMEGAALPHA ["Behold, the enormous French mountain? Yeah, right!"?]
I've always enjoyed the sort of wordplay featured in these theme answers, where — as in the charade or heteronym — the letters and their order remain the same, while the spacing changes to amusing effect. I sometimes see it as a special kind of anagram, another longtime obsession of mine. (Readers of this column who are also interested in anagrams and an extra bit of daily wordplay might enjoy a puzzle series I've been running at AnagramsAroundEve.com, with crossword-style clues with anagram phrase solutions.)