My roommates Cody and Austin just finished racing this puzzle - Cody won in like 35 minutes. I wanted to do a crossword where the theme words would be relatively easy to get, but difficult to spell. This was inspired by my roommate Cody, whom I force to solve my crosswords, who is a terrible speller and is vocal about it. If you want to see the clues, do the puzzle, I'm only uploading a picture of the answers.
It wasn't too easy thinking of the spelling words though. I actually downloaded the Scripps spelling bee word list and leafed through it, but most of those words are just unknown and really not that cool. So I Googled a list of commonly misspelled words and came up with ENTREPRENEURIAL and PHARMACEUTICALS, the latter of which isn't really that hard to spell but I bet some people might have had a bit of trouble with the middle letters. I also really wanted to use AHMADINEJAD, which really no one can spell. At this point I realized I could throw an added bone to the twist, because each of those three words could apply to the Georgetown schools - Business, Nursing and Foreign Service. The difficulty was in thinking of a word for College students like myself, cause our thing is that we're academically indecisive. My other roommate gave me the idea for HERMENEUTIC, which I actually had never heard of before I put it in here. Its not ideal, its more of a vocab word than a spelling word, but whatever. Deal with it.
Ok quickly - I tried to make the clues fairly straightforward and easy, so not too many clever things to speak of. ESPN (Bristol, CT co.) could have been easier, and SMARTY (Jones that had a shot at the Triple Crown) was deceptive, because the clue suggests a baseball player (Chipper?). CASS and NLE were the puzzle's worst clues, although everyone at RL would have gotten NLE no problem (National Latin Exam that we all took). IRENA Sendler was the most famous Irena I could find, that one kinda sucked too. Both Austin and Cody got ARIE wrong, misspelling AHMADINEJAD
and getting the word as ERIE. SNOT was the grossest answer and NYMET the most unusual. But my favorite two answers were STFU and FML (Shut the fuck up and Fuck my life). STFU was not intended but I was having a really tough time in that top middle section, partly because I needed a 4 letter word that ended in U. Then I had a revelation and finished that section well, although I thought that I could find some sort of legit clue for Cass. FML has been a word I've been trying to get in for a while, and after I got STFU in, I figured I might go for a mini-theme and get FML in too. I actually did the whole bottom 3 sections by hand in theology class. Cody remarked that while he dislikes my "Artsy and European clues" such as MOMA, EURO and LYRES, he owns the sports ones. Oh and lastly, I really enjoyed the self-promotional 1 down MATH (My major).
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