This has been one of those weeks where I’ve felt like a whole football team’s worth of tasks has been jumping me. Something had to give somewhere, and it’s this post—I just don’t have the time to do it up the way I’d like. Which is a shame, because it’s a really cool idea to talk about.
A while back, I mentioned knitted strings, a kind of word charade that’s sometimes looped around into a snake charmer. In both cases, my examples were pretty themeless in and of themselves. The knitted strings in the Ubercross Abecedaria K were clued as knock-knock-joke fill-in-the-blanks, but most of them weren’t part of that category naturally, forcing me to invent new knock-knock jokes for them to be a part of.
Jimmy Peniston, however, has done me one better, at least in the short format. His NYT puzzle from last Wednesday bears the following theme answers:
APPLEGATE, AUTOMATON, ACHOO, and LIVE DATES can restring into APPLE, GATEAU, TOMATO, NACHO, OLIVE, and DATES. And that makes the first set of words a “food chain.”
If I had a little more time, I’d explore the possibilities of such “themed knits.” Trying to get a natural theme out of both set of words is probably too much to ask, but there are lots of extensive themed lists—my usual movies, TV shows, and books, plus cars, actor last names, and so on—that seem like they could yield a string of unrelated words like this, with a little luck.
Some other night, I’ll look into that and see if I can give Peniston’s efforts some company. But tonight, just registering my interest in it is about as far as I can go. And so to bed!