Agreed. I thought that was the subtle clue that Charlie was the odd one out in that group of five, but no. Especially with Peppermint Patty’s full name included.
Peppermint Patty called him “Chuck”.
Yes, but that wasn’t one of the answers in today’s puzzle. I stand by my nitpick.
I noticed the same thing in today’s puzzle. I don’t recall anyone referring to Charlie Brown as just “Charlie”, but the strip ran for decades so it may have happened. I understand your nitpick, but I don’t know if it’s blatantly unfair.
What did Marcie call Charlie Brown; was it “Charles”?
I really didn’t care much for today’s puzzle, so I made one of my own.
| TANGO | MIRROR | OSCAR | SMITH |
| PARROT | STRAWBERRY | ECHO | MARCH |
| COOPER | SANDWICH | HOTEL | FINCH |
| FOXTROT | APE | LEMONADE | NOVEMBER |
As for today’s puzzle, has anyone heard of…
…Jack Ma
…“CAKE” as a synonym for ENVELOP
?
Jack Ma, no, never heard of it. But caking on pancake makeup or being caked in flour after dropping a bag of it, sure.
I didn’t get a single answer correct. I got stuck on wedding stuff but just did not connect the dots with train. And there was no way I was pulling cake out of a group of wedding words.
Yeah name got me too. Never heard of them.
The verb I did know. But still I failed today’s puzzle.
MIRROR PARROT APE ECHO [to copy]
SMITH LEMONADE NOVEMBER FINCH [black…]
HOTEL TANGO OSCAR FOXTROT [NATO alphabet]
COOPER STRAWBERRY SANDWICH MARCH [dunno so the above are probably wrong]
I’d heard of Jack Ma and assumed he was too obscure for this kind of general knowledge puzzle, but ended up guessing him anyway on the assumption that there was some other Jack Ma who I didn’t know about .
Missed one guess on this puzzle.
The screwy thing is, I got Jack Ma. I saw the other three JACKs, and googled to find the fourth. I still feel like that’s way too obscure, especially when there are other JACKs that could be used.
And I still don’t like the synonyms for ENVELOP. If CAKE, COAT, and COVER are verbs, then CRUST
is problematic. As a verb, to me, that refers to something that’s already covered in liquid and the liquid solidifies.
MIRROR PARROT APE ECHO is correct. The others are not.
Heh. I did the exact same thing. That was after I got the wedding terms on the third try, reasoning that ‘cake’ could mean an outer coating, like ‘crust’. But I was totally clueless on what was my last category: ‘Social Media App Endings’.
I did the same thing, I saw the three Jacks and googled the rest of the words to see who could be the other one. I’ve never heard of the guy before.
I did end up getting this one, but only because I had seen your post about the cake. I took a guess with the bridal stuff and threw out cake as the second guess and got lucky. I didn’t think this was a very good one.
Just a general question to the contributors of this thread: When should we stop using Spoilers when talking about today’s puzzle? I’m generally done by 9:00 Central Time, but I’m sure there are others who work the puzzle later, especially those in the Mountain and Pacific zones, not to mention Alaska and Hawaii.
Right, spoilers should always be added for those in earlier time zones - I often play the word games at night (I’m on Pacific Standard Time), and there could be posts for tomorrow’s game already from other time zones. I haven’t contributed in here yet (until today…see below), but I have been lurking, though I haven’t gotten spoiled yet, thankfully.
I failed today’s puzzle (#106) miserably - I only got one category correct with the help of google (for Jack Ma - never heard of him before). The social media apps didn’t even occur to me, and the others I just floundered with and kept getting one word wrong.
I’ve failed before a few times, but usually it’s something I am not even remotely familiar with…this one was just frustrating. They all can’t be easy though. 
I knew Jack Ma immediately. If not for that, I’d have had trouble with the rest of the words.
Today’s was very quick, though I was annoyed that three of them were specific snakes, while one was a category of snake .
I have no idea. This feels harder than any NY Times version I’ve tried. How about a spoilered reveal?
You can still get points for the connections in the groups you didn’t find, so let’s resolve the wall.
APE PARROT ECHO MIRROR
FOXTROT NOVEMBER OSCAR HOTEL
TANGO SANDWICH LEMONADE STRAWBERRY
SMITH FINCH COOPER MARCH
Answers:
Synonyms for copy.
Letters in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
Begin with shades of yellow (TAN, SAND, LEMON, STRAW).
Best Actor Oscar winners (Will SMITH, Peter FINCH, Gary COOPER, Frederic MARCH).
Just typing that fills me with a sense of haughty derision.