2-2-2 meta explanation + winner!
Last week's meta had me asking for some things that often come in twos.
Meta solution and explanation after the cut!
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As many of you could tell by this puzzle's last theme entry, the theme of this puzzle was AELINDROMES. For those uninitiated (as I was up until very recenty), an aelindrome is a variation on the palindrome created by poet Anthony Etherin, where instead of a sequence of letters reading the same forward and backwards, a sequence of letter chunks read the same forward and backwards. An enumeration will often accompany the aelindrome, designating the lengths of those letter chunks.
Some examples by Anthony Etherin:
"Intense ion, Einstein!" (22222) with the letter chunks [in][te][ns][ei][on]
"Reside in desire" (2222) with the letter chunks [re][si][de][in]
"Melody, a bloody elm" (1234) with the letter chunks [m][el][ody][ablo]
Anyway, back to the puzzle:
There were four other obvious theme answers:
WE'RE SCREWED [[Gif of Shaggy and Scooby both gulping]]
INSTANT TANS [Some spray results]
CITRUS FRUIT [Orange, e.g.]
EUSTOMATOUS [Having a distinct and well-developed mouth (ooh la la!)]
The last word is a wildcard, I know LOL, but there's a very particular reason why I chose those specific four: that's because they are all *almost* aelindromes with an enumeration of (222), with the exception of one letter:
WE/RE/SC/RE/WE + D
I + NS/TA/NT/TA/NS
C + IT/RU/SF/RU/IT
E + US/TO/MA/TO/US
Those extra letters, in order, spell DICE, which are some things that often come in twos. Neat, huh?
Thanks to Will Nediger for test-solving!
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Finding phrases whose extra letters were specific letters wasn't really a problem, as I found the phrases first and created a meta answer from the collection of extra letters I had. (I'm very happy I could tie it in with the "twos" theme.) Finding a phrase whose extra letter was E was the hard part, as I didn't already have one. EUSTOMATOUS came up while searching on The Word's Word, which allowed me to ReGex search the OneLook database (highly recommend!!). It's an absurd word, but it provides a really funny mental image to me and the crossings are fair so I consider it a bonus.
Here are some other phrases that didn't fit in the puzzle:
FESTIVITIES -> (F)ES/TI/VI/TI/ES
There weren't many. If you know more, share them in the comments below!
Here's the ReGex pattern I used to find them!
(A (\w) designates a letter and \1 refers to the the first (\w), \2 to the second (\w), etc.):
(\w)(\w)(\w)(\w)..\3\4\1\2
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There were 19 correct answers this week, with a 100% correct response rate. The winner of a Luckystreak Xwords+ Subby Baka comp subscription is Karen Spencer! Congrats to Karen!!
I'll be back on the blog soon! In the meantime, check out my Patreon and look out for my upcoming Boswords puzzle!
Seeya soon, and thanks for solving!
- Ada
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