It's great that there's a place for the, shall we say, more unusual crossword puzzles that come to mind every now and then. And MEOW is that place! I trust you will enjoy the unusual grid and are able to find your way to the meta answer, which is a name. (Note that the numbers in brackets are word enumerations and are not meta-related; they are provided to help fill in the uncrossed entries.) Answer and explanation: https://www.xword-muggles.com/viewtopic.php?p=107128#p107128
Check out "The MOAT Mini Pack of Marching Bands" here: https://www.ephesusscroll.com/about/interest4.html. US$5 gets you 7 Marching Bands which, hard enough on their own, now contain metas too. And once again there's a mega-meta!
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Comments
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Sorry about that misdirect. Elements definitely have names, though.
DIS 🤓5:07 · over 2 years ago
Definitely needed the nudges -- thanks.
Qmark 7:20 · over 2 years ago
Wow, Ben! That was tough but awesome construction.
I needed the 3rd Nudge to get me thinking chemically...once I saw that the Ps jumped out at me.
Darth 🤓2:53 · over 2 years ago
I thought it was going to be a name of a person. Hmm...
boharr 3s · over 2 years ago
As noted in the comments, using "name" as a prompt is practically useless. Everything has name.
rjy 10s · over 2 years ago
Yeah - my first two answers were SILICON SALLY and SILICONE SALLY, expecting the answer to be a "name" name. Some variants of the "She Sells Sea Shells" rhyme refer to "Sally sells sea shells..."
...tho some references to SILICONE SALLY tiptoe away from family-friendly G-rated crossword conventions
sings "Silicon Sally" (not the other, haha) to "Mustang Sally," adjusting syllables as needed
Bird Lives 5s · over 2 years ago
I was going to name my daughter Silicon, hoping that it would help her get a full scholarship at Stanford. Then it turned out to be a boy. Silicon is just no a name for a boy.
Bbaack 9:44 · over 2 years ago
I needed the nudges for this one as well as Google to remind me what I learned in chemistry a long time ago. Nice construction!
rjy 10s · over 2 years ago
Incidentally - my alternate answer for 1A was INSTITUTIONAL BANK - same number of letters, same first/last letters, just one fewer E. Would've made for a Silicon ion...
Glad you found an outlet for all those wonderful puns!
KayW 8:12 · over 2 years ago
A very clever puzzle!! Again this week - me, not so much. I too tried PETER PIPER pre-nudges. I lost track of how many atomic-related scientists I tried (LOL Ben can probably see that from the stats). It didn't help that at first pass I counted 13 Ps and Es, and didn't think to recount until this morning. I too was stuck on people names rather than element names - but I understand the need for ambiguity in the prompt.
I thought there was going to be some crazy matching up of all the "shells" now into the 5-by-5 grid and having all the "P"s stand for something. They certainly did, of course, but I was never getting there. In retrospect, I wish I did since I also tutor chemistry, but if you don't see it, you don't see it.
I probably would've went with "7-letter word" on the prompt, since I was a bit surprised that SILICON actually worked! (I'm also assuming 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p2 is in play with the "E"s representing electrons in the corresponding shells!)