Clue: One keeping a watch on someone?
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Answer: strap
You know, you can put this shit in the middle of the puzzle somewhere …fine. But 1 Across? Fuck you!
I’ll hate you from this day forward. May our paths never again, well, cross.
Humph. See you next Sunday.
Dammit.
Dude. Needing to solve clues in the NYT Sunday crossword in numerical order of appearance ONLY is probably a cry for help of some kind.
Also: Would it have killed you to tell us how many letters were supposed to be in the answer?
Great, now I feel like a jerk with OCD. Really, I don’t have to solve clues in any particular order, but I do tend to start with 1 Across, and it’s nice to at least have a fighting chance of getting a foothold. Sorry about omitting the letter count though.
I laughed when I read the spoiler. That’s really very clever.
Can you do the NYT crossword online?
That would be really cool!
What the heck else would it be? That question mark is a dead giveaway.
I think I did the crossword this past Sunday and that clue didn’t jump out at me as particularly tricky.
Moved to the Game Room, with a brief stop in MPSIMS because I’m kinda dense.
“It keeps a watch on someone” would be better, IMO. “One keeping a watch” suggests a person.
I agree.
Chain. This, along with most question marked clues, is probably best savbed until a second go-through.
Hey, that wasn’t my Sunday 1-across; what gives?
And I agree that ‘one’ implies a person. Iffy clue.
mmm
Aren’t watches kept on with bands?
Just looking at the little tooltip preview in the thread listing, I immediately thought “clasp”. I was on the right track.
This doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult crossword clue.
Hmm, I wouldn’t have been so vulgar if I’d known this would end up in the game room.
If the the clue had been, it keeps … maybe I would have made the leap. As it was, I was figuring it would be some sort of timekeeper for a race or something. Sure, timekeeper doesn’t fit, but the theme included leaving out letters so who knows? Or it could have been timer.
I do the crosswords online through an iPad app. This was the Sunday, May 1 puzzle.
I’m the LAT crossword type.
But the ? helps, though I tend to think they are awful.
That’s what I thought, too, until I realised that maybe the OP intended “One” to refer to the clue number? So it would have been less-ambiguously rendered as “1. Keeping a watch on someone?”.
Why is the question mark a dead giveaway? And yes, “one” in this case implies the answer is a person. I don’t like the clue, either, although I would not have pitted it.
There is nothing wrong with that. Years ago I used to catch the train home and every day sat with the same guy. We would take turns solving clues in the crossword, ideally going through them in order, handing the paper and pen back and forth. The non-solving dude was free to read his book while the solving dude found the first solvable clue. Randomly jumping about looking for solutions was verboten. There is a reason that things are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 etc
Clues with question marks on the end are a signal that it’s a pun, or out-of-the-box answer. It’s standard for the NY Times crossword.
The “one” is perfectly fair, too. If I own a watch strap, I have one. I need one to to keep a watch on me.
The point of the NYT puzzle is that the words can have two meanings. It just short of a cryptic crossword (the most challenging of them all), where such things happen in just about every definition. The standard one-to-one definitions in most US crosswords are the main reason I don’t bother with them.