Name Dropping
The first sign of any shenanigans I noticed was at 94D, “Like England in the late 16th century.” I had a hunch about what the entry could be (it involved a certain queen), but I could not pinpoint what was going on until I hit 92D, “2004 Don Cheadle film set in Africa.” This is another specific bit of trivia that I was certain of: The movie is “Hotel Rwanda.” But the entry at 92D is only six letters long, and the ones that fit are the first six: HOTEL R. “Dastardly expression,” at 121A, solves to SNEER, sharing that R in HOTEL R, so there’s no indication of a rebus — just a handful of extra letters, W-A-N-D-A, falling off the bottom of the puzzle.
This was enough information for me to figure out that 91D, “Person dealing with casting and lines,” was FLY FIS, with H-E-R-M-A-N as extra letters. I realized that this entry was in the same column as 18-Down, one of the five entries with shaded squares, and that there were several crossing letters entered there, some of them in the shaded area. The clue at 18-Down, “Reeked,” had made little sense until this moment, when I mentally filled in the gaps of S H _ _ M A _ T A N K with the E, R and N from H-E-R-M-A-N to get SHERMAN TANK. For “Reeked?” Look at it this way: If you drop HERMAN from that entry, you’re left with STANK.
With fresh eyes, I looked at 19-Down, which runs in the same column as 92D, HOTEL R(W-A-N-D-A). “Check out, as a book,” solves to BOW AND ARROW; drop WANDA, and you get BORROW.
Once I figured out the “name dropping” here, the rest of the examples were deducible (although 110D took a minute, and then cracked me up).
Tricky Clues
47A. I found this challenging and unfamiliar, but it’s actually the most common way that this entry has been clued in the crossword, plural or singular, since the 1940s. “Curved edges formed by intersecting vaults, in architecture,” are GROINS, which create strong supports in a vast space and appear in many medieval churches.
Source: The New York Times
