From TechRadar · · 1m 30s
Connections #1190: cliffs, cats and presidents
Sunday's puzzle hides presidents behind a cartoon cat and mountains at the end of ordinary words.
In brief
Sunday's puzzle hides presidents behind a cartoon cat and mountains at the end of ordinary words. When a word looks obviously themed, check its last syllable instead. GARFIELD was a president, not the cat, and HEATHCLIFF ends in a cliff. Originally reported by TechRadar.
Sunday's sixteen words
Game #1190 serves up PORRIDGE, GARFIELD, DROOPY, EMPTY, HEATHCLIFF, EXCESS, GRANT, SLACK, ODIE, PARAMOUNT, SAGGING, MADISON, FLACCID, KEWPIE, CLEVELAND and DOUBLESPEAK.
Four clues, no answers
The gentle nudge: yellow is squishy, green is American leaders, blue is double characters, purple is geographical endings.
“YELLOW: Squishy. GREEN: American leaders. BLUE: Double characters. PURPLE: Geographical endings”
Yellow is the soft one
Lacking in firmness ties together DROOPY, FLACCID, SAGGING and SLACK. The easiest grab of the four, if you resist reading DROOPY as the cartoon dog.
Green hides four presidents
CLEVELAND, GARFIELD, GRANT and MADISON are all US presidents. The trap is that three of them read equally well as a city, a cat or a verb.
Blue words sound like letters
Say EMPTY, EXCESS, KEWPIE and ODIE out loud and you get MT, XS, QP and OD. Homophone groups are why Connections punishes silent reading.
Purple ends on high ground
DOUBLESPEAK, HEATHCLIFF, PARAMOUNT and PORRIDGE each finish with a peak, cliff, mount or ridge. Elevated landforms buried in the last syllable.
One mistake, one lucky break
The writer chased a comic-strip cat theme and guessed DROOPY and CLEVELAND alongside GARFIELD and HEATHCLIFF. That wrong turn is what exposed the "cliff" in HEATHCLIFF.
“The silver lining to my error was that it made me notice "cliff" at the end of HEATHCLIFF”
Here's the gist
When a word looks obviously themed, check its last syllable instead. GARFIELD was a president, not the cat, and HEATHCLIFF ends in a cliff.
