March 30, 2023 – Stay ' til the End for the Payoff

This is my 5th Thursday puzzle this month. Thanks for playing!

Discussion (contains spoilers!)

This week, I was determined to write a themed puzzle.

With Patrick Berry's book, I went about my week trying to find wordplay in various phrases or idioms that came up in day-to-day-life.

No, really! This next one'll have spoilers!

Caitie suggested a theme of alternate names for money or weed, thinking that green would be a nice go-along-with for spring.

That led me to look up slang terms for money. And then, for each of those terms, I looked for phrases that contained one of those slang words but which did not itself refer to money.

And, from there, I collected various phrases. I had a couple 15s, a 13, some 11s, and some 10s. I threw out the 13 on account of the grid this week. Maybe it'll live to see another day.

Some fun facts about cluing this grid...

I knew that I wanted to clue NIGEL as the chessplayer, but I didn't know quite how to reference him. Then I found this tweet where he said he prefers "legend", so here we are.

This puzzle had some dupes relative to previous puzzles of mine. So, I tried to find better ways to clue SSNS and OMEN. Last time, a friend suggested to me that OMENs are not all auspicious, so here, they're just a [sign].

Also, this ELMER is the same one from the glue bottle. Small world, eh?

I'm not sure if y'all would know a CRIT, so I tried to hint at it with the [as in D&D] ADD-IN.

I've seen NIL clued as [nothing] (or its equivalents) many times before, so I wanted to stray a bit.

Because of the similarity of ICAN and CANI, I wanted them to be related. And, Windows unfortunately means the same thing for both 40D and 46D – ideally, I might have avoided that.

You can still find La LINEA online. I highly recommend it!

I hope you have a great week. Until next time. :)