Cluing C-Words

Like CLUE.

Things are pretty busy for me tonight, but luckily, I pre-wrote a few posts when they weren’t! So, here, enjoy a few more ideas for common words and the range of possibilities in cluing them…

CAR, of course, is most commonly clued as “That vroom-vroom go-go thing that takes us to the supermarket.” Or words to that effect. Puzzlemakers sometimes have fun by naming a couple of well-known cars that are also names for other things, like “Mercury and Saturn” or “Jaguar, for one.”

But a CAR can also be one of the units attached to a train, which has sleeping and dining cars, among others. And did you know that the people-carrying part of an elevator is also a car? (Most of us think of that as the whole elevator, but anyway.)

CAT usually means “The meowing creature that’s annoying me as I write this—no, you think you want to go out, but when I open the door, you’ll decide it’s too cold and—not now, Thor!” It, too, can be clued as “Jaguar, for one.”

You can either have the cat get your tongue and not speak enough, or let the cat out of the bag and speak too much. Look what the cat dragged in, raining cats and dogs, fighting like cats and dogs, curiosity killed the cat, except when it was the cat that ate the canary…cats have plenty of presence in both our language and our lives.

But a CAT scan can be an important health measure for some of us, and if you want a more challenging connection, “catting” can also mean raising anchor.

Finally, a CONE is a very common shape. Dunce caps and party hats, megaphones and oil funnels, tipis and steeples, drinking glasses and paper cups…they all follow that form.

But in a few contexts, you can just say “cone” and people know what you mean. Your ice cream server will ask you, “cup or cone?” And when you say “there’s cones on the street,” everyone knows you mean the traffic kind, not the ice cream kind. Although if you say there’s cones on the driveway, people might assume you mean the pine kind.

One cone I’m seeing a bit more talk about is the vapor cone (or, more rarely, shock cone) that appears around aircraft and spacecraft when they start really picking up speed. It’s always fun to clue science.