In the modern media age, the kind of quotation that gets the most play is the catchphrase.
Most catchphrases come to us from TV shows, ads, or movies that use them as a touchstone for their characters, repeating them like a mantra.
Other catchphrases are only officially used once, but they’re so memorable that they inspire imitators and get repeated out of context for years, even generations. (“Go ahead, make my day.” “No one expects the Spanish inquisition!”
Elsewhere, I've discussed how acrostics, a quote-focused kind of puzzle, could be enhanced by using shorter quotes. Here I was interested in how short a catchphrase could get and still function as a catchphrase. The lower limit seems to be three letters—“D’oh!”—but there were a lot of them short enough to fit into a regular or Sunday crossword.
There were, in fact, enough of them that if I tried fitting them all in there, I’d need more space. I’d need a giant crossword’s worth of space.
So that was the theme I settled on: quick quotes. The quotes had to be so familiar and “outstanding” that I could clue them like so:
“___” (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 12 letters)
“___” (Austin Powers, 12 letters)
“___” (The Shining/The Tonight Show, 11 letters)
The answers, in these cases, would be ALRIGHTY THEN, YEAH BABY YEAH, and HERE’S JOHNNY. I would have loved to do more quotes with overlapping attributions like HERE’S JOHNNY, but they’re just too hard to find for a giant puzzle and too irregular in length for a smaller one.
Even a lot of the well-known movie lines (like you might see in the cut above) are still too long to qualify as “quick.” But there are only a handful of 3-7-letter entries that work. I set the upper limit at 20 letters…maybe a little high, but one quote I really liked also happened to have a Q in it. So that worked out.*
*As I mentioned a long time back, each section features as high a representation of its letter as possible. So this one used a lot of Q-words, including some that rarely if ever make it into other crosswords. Q is such an uncommon letter that this feature almost QUALIFIED as a secondary theme, and sometimes I got pulled in two different directions—put in a few more quotes, or put in a QUETZALCOATL or INQUISITIONIST? There’s always a little more you want to do.
But I’m glad I could tip my hat to QUEER QROSSWORDS…that was worth clearing a space for!
Next: Enough of this patting my own back…I’ll tell you about some puzzles I made recently that nobody liked!