By Tom Toce
Since in court anything you say can be used against you, we offer some good advice, which comes from the entry at 24A. Seventeen answers, eight from across clues and nine from down, have an extra letter. These letters must be removed before insertion into the grid. (Both the clued answer and the grid entry are, of course, valid words.) Read in clue order (across first, then down), the 17 letters spell out a pertinent four-word phrase, a well-known quote from 24A.
There are six proper nouns among the grid entries (and one more which can be a proper noun but doesn’t have to be). There are three more proper nouns among the 13 special entries, one of which doesn’t have to be a proper noun but is as clued. There is one common foreign word among the grid entries. Everything else is playable in Scrabble.
Two grid entries (4A and 35A) may seem to violate the principle that at least half the letters in an answer should be checked. Each of these clues leads to an eight-letter answer, so three letters are checked in the grid and the fourth is checked by the quote. The eight-letter answer at 4A is unusual. To quote Stephen Sondheim, “Ignore punctuation, which is designed to confuse.”
Thanks to Jerry Miccolis for test-solving and editorial suggestions.
Click here to read the full puzzle and to find the solution to the previous issue’s Puzzle.