Let’s do the spoiler part right up front: the theme of Ubercross Abecedaria M was MONOGRAMMATIC MIGRATION.
“Monogram” is a bit oddly defined in wordplay, although it feels like it shouldn’t be. Its etymology is simple enough: “mono” meaning “single, alone, one” and “gram” meaning “letter, line, that which is drawn or written.” That seems to work out to “single letter,” and that’s how I’ve sometimes used it, like when talking about my own first name, for example.
And from related words like monovocalic, it seems like a monogram could be limited to just one letter, or one kind of letter, as in “XXX” or “Sssssss!”
Crossword clues, however, sometimes use “monogram” to refer to three initials in combiniation, as in “Eighties White House monogram” for RWR, Ronald Wilson Reagan. This at least alludes to the dictionary definition of “monogram,” primarily “a design consisting of two or more alphabetic letters combined or interlaced, commonly one's initials, often printed on stationery, embroidered on clothing, etc.” or “a single emblematic or decorative letter; applied initial.”
The puzzle uses the first sense. I’ve talked before about transformational crossword themes, turning one string into another by adding, subtracting, or changing some smaller string within it. With an Ubercross-sized puzzle, I could thoroughly explore the simplest kind of addition and subtraction.
The first line has ON-GIN/OFF-GIN, SIN FUSION, and IMPERIL STORMTROOPERS on the left of the M, near the top (altered from ON AGAIN, OFF AGAIN, ASIAN FUSION, and IMPERIAL STORMTROOPERS). On the same line, at the right of the M, is IRRATIONAL NUMB ERA, MAGMA LION, and APIA SAMOA BEACH (from IRRATIONAL NUMBER, MGM LION, PISMO BEACH).
Note that the number of A’s missing from the left entries is the same as the number of A’s added to the right entries. The second themed line features a similar “migration” of Bs, the third of Cs, and so on all the way down to Zs at the bottom.
All the examples of each letter were sucked out of the “base phrases” on the left side. I would’ve preferred for the right side’s base phrases to have no examples of those letters, but that wasn’t always a workable goal…turning PISMO into APIA SAMOA was enough of a find that I figured it was worth ignoring the A already in BEACH. Outside of onomatopoeia, there aren’t many words that turn into other legitimate words or phrases when you add four different A’s to them.
I also considered it fair game to add or subtract a space here and there, as in PISMO to APIA SAMOA and NUMBER to NUMB ERA. I’d had good results with that in the IJ puzzle, so I kept it up here.
At roughly 160 theme answers, this design leaves me pretty satisfied. Like the IJ puzzle, it’s just about the right size: big enough to accommodate all the stuff I really wanted to fit in, but not so big that the strain shows too much. The design of the M meant that the letters at the bottom of the alphabet got slightly less attention, and since most letters after T are less common than average, I had fewer tricks to play with them, so that worked out. Handling Q was the hardest part; I wouldn’t want to try adding any more to that line.
Tomorrow: word pyramids and ladders!