Spoiler Sunday: Getting "In"

More than once, even!

I knew early that the Ubercross Abecedaria would have an IJ puzzle, not two separate puzzles for I and J. Twenty-five puzzles are a lot easier to put in a grid than twenty-six, so some pair had to share one. “I” is the narrowest capital letter in most typefaces and “J” is among the narrowest in almost as many. J is also one of the hardest letters to work with, so I knew it’d be a tiny bit easier on me as a designer if I used “only” half an Ubercross to focus on the J-words I wanted to celebrate.

As often happens, this decision led to the next problem. What was I going to do for a theme that would reflect both I and J?

I was intrigued by their shared history. The reason these two letters look so similar is that they used to be the same letter, doing double duty as a vowel and consonant the way Y does now. Back in Jesus’s day, his name was “Iesus” (more or less). So for a while, I chased the idea of doing something with that interchangeability. What if I did some kooky entries that turned “I” into “J” and others that turned “J” into “I”?

The answer: it would be pretty boring!

I do think it’s a perfectly valid idea for a regular-sized crossword. You can get a few fun phrases from doing it—

IV FOOTBALL (Sport played by ICU patients?)

PADDED-FOOT PIS (Gumshoes with soft shoes?)

OJ LED UP (Simpson guided to top balcony?)

MARCH OF DJ ME’S (Bunch of my clones taking the record world by storm?)

—but not enough to fill a respectable amount of space in an Ubersized puzzle. I’d struggle just to do eight of these, let alone the fifty or so I figured I would need. And the biggest words/phrases that withstand an I-J conversion are ALEA IACTA EST/ALEA JACTA EST and I ACCUSE/J’ACCUSE, and in both pairs, the meanings are identical or nearly so.

So I shifted to thinking about I-J-words I could make into a theme. Injury? Ink-jet? In-jokes were comedy, and crosswords use humor, but I didn’t want to do a lot of clues that you had to be a crossword expert to get. Injection, as in “injecting” letters to make an additive crossword theme, was more promising. But what to inject?

I could try injecting I’s and J’s, but that overlapped a little too much with another idea I was already trying in a later puzzle. I bounced back and forth between “injection” and “in-jokes” until suddenly I realized: why not both? If I injected the two-letter string IN, that would be an IN joke in-joke!

Adding INs to words in common phrases was fun and easy, thanks to the Algebraic Crossword interface Alex Boisvert developed some years ago from Alan Rosenberg’s original script. Boisvert now points users to Adam Aaronson’s Wordlisted, an even better resource.

In fact, adding the INs was…almost too easy.

Crossword themes need to be calibrated. Having too many options is almost as bad as having too few. For instance, if I did a puzzle called “world tour” and used four different countries as my theme entries, the theme would be too “loose” if “countries” was my only restriction. Solvers would stare at it upon completion and mutter, “Surely that can’t be all there is to this theme…can it?”

As it turns out, IN is one of the most common two-letter strings in the English language. There are thousands of words, names, and phrases that turn into other meaningful things when you add an IN to them. And that’s not even counting “breakups” like RAMPS turning into RAM PINS (Bowl successfully?) Admittedly, not all of them are interesting: HEROES to HEROINES doesn’t really change much. But still, having thousands of options makes picking even fifty less impressive than it should be.

So I added an additional restriction: each theme entry adds at least two IN’s to its base phrase at different points. Sometimes I added both INs to a single word, as in STAINING PARTIES, sometimes I added one to each word, as in CHARMIN INOFFENSIVE, and sometimes one of the INs was its own word, as in INVEST IN POCKETS. And there were “breakups” that changed the spacing from their original word or phrase, like ASININE PSIS (from ASEPSIS).

This turned out to be just the right balance of creative latitude and theme-tightness; I got forty-eight themers in the final puzzle and I stopped pretty close to just before I would’ve run out of good ideas. You want to give the world the best show you can…but you always want to get off the stage before they ask you to go!