Did the omega across clue/entry in last week's MOAT pique your curiosity? If it did, then jump straight in! If not, no matter: jump straight in anyway. ;-) The answer to the meta is what acronyms do. Answer & explanation: https://www.xword-muggles.com/viewtopic.php?p=202233#p202233
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!
Every so often a tricky-to-clue unusual word/acronym/initialism finds its way into the fill of a grid I'm constructing. To make it as easy as possible for solvers I have often clued these as "Apt acronym for..." where the entry can be directly read off the first letters of the parts of the acronym. Last night, just before dropping off to sleep, I thought, "There's a meta idea in there somewhere." But that night I dreamt that this idea was the mechanism of someone else's meta puzzle, and I remember being disappointed that I wouldn't be able to use it. When I woke up I was very pleased to discover that it had all been a dream after all, so I was free to construct a meta along those lines, and this was the result. Hope you enjoyed it. :D
Fun one, Ben! I think you exhausted just about every acronym out there. Thanks for the puzzle.
Carolyn 3s · 2025-04-15T16:42:29.697Z
Excellent!
boharr 3s · 2025-04-15T14:05:11.178Z
I was confused because I was thinking that acronyms can be pronounced as words while abbreviations can’t. So the acronym NASA worked fine, and I thought there would be others like that. But then it became obvious I had to use abbreviations to solve. I do realize that an acronym is a type of abbreviation, but they are distinct.
Got sidetracked initially (npi) by all the non-relevant (and symmetric!) extra acronyms. But once I started with the fake ones rather than the other way around it got easier. Fun idea, thanks.
WOW, I was SOOOOOO far off! I was looking at WHITE/DISK/FLOOR as being able to be completed with SPACE, then THE (as in the french Tea) TIME and GODTIME, then finally TIME and SPACE as each completing each other. The answer then was of course SAVE TIME AND SPACE. Imagine my surprise when Crosshare told me NO, and even greater surprise when Ben said, "You are not even on the right track". I have been going back and forth looking at both sets of acronyms, certain that the others CANNOT have been unintentional and Nudge 2 confirmed that. Then GOD and TGIF seemed to coalesce...hmmm? Oh my, ROFL and FLOOR, if there is a third I know it has to be the path...SPACE and NASA, well darn.
Very interesting Ben, but of course if you keep waking up to say "It has all been a dream" we are going to have to call you Dorothy or Bobby!