Globe and Mail Crossword Breakdown: 'Transferable Skills' Puzzle Turns Job Phrases into Punny Answers

The first theme clue in the Globe and Mail's Saturday Weekender for Sept. 5 sits at 23A, and it gives a solver almost nothing to hold: "The successful server had ..." Most people working through the Across clues in order, the column's writer suspects, will not know what to do with it, or with the six clues that follow in the same mold.

The puzzle is called Transferable Skills. It was built by Jeffrey Martinovic, an Ontario constructor the columnist credits with a seemingly endless supply of creative theme ideas. The write-up appears in Puzzle Pieces, the weekly column on the Weekender and the Weekender Cryptic, and it is full of spoilers by design.

The gimmick only comes clear once some Down entries are in the grid. Each theme answer is a familiar phrase recast as a quality a professional would need to succeed. The successful server had WAITING GAME at 23A. The salesperson had PERFECT PITCH at 34A, and the locksmith had EASY PICKINGS at 46A. At 65A the clothing designer had TIMELY FASHION, and at 83A the hairstylist had PARTING GIFTS. The gastroenterologist at 101A had GUT INSTINCTS, and the chess player at 113A had SMOOTH MOVES.

The columnist treats this as a palate cleanser. Recent Weekender themes involved removing letters, turning parts of words vertical and letting entries run off the edge of the grid. The writer enjoys those tricky constructions, but welcomed a straightforward puzzle built on silliness, with no tricks and only old-fashioned wordplay. Martinovic's own note says the idea had been on his mind for years. He usually builds "word architecture" themes, so a punny one feels special to him. He thanked Jess for pushing him to keep working and make it the best it could be.

The column also singles out several non-theme clues, with a reminder that a question mark means the clue should not be read literally. At 79D, [Bread boxes?] has nothing to do with kitchen containers. It plays on bread as slang for money, and the answer is ATMS. The columnist notes that, like real bread boxes, you can only take out what you put in.

At 32A, [Washers' dryers?] might suggest matched laundry appliances, but it simply means what a person washing something needs for drying: TOWELS. At 57D, [Viral property?] works on the word's modern sense. Once it would have meant only illness, and now it equally suggests memes and internet trends. The joke is that the clue means exactly what it says, a property of actual viruses, so the answer is CONTAGION. At 67D, [Teeny tiny?] is answered by LIL, a word that is itself teeny.

The column closes with its cryptic clue of the week, from the same Sept. 5 puzzle. The columnist points newcomers to Fraser Simpson's guide, How to solve The Globe's cryptic crossword. Recent weeks introduced the charade clue, which splits an entry into parts and clues each one, and showed that clues often combine mechanisms, as with last week's charade with a reversal.

This week's clue is at 29A: [Doctor certainly acquires last of major appliances (6)]. It joins a charade, a container and a letter-selection device. The misdirection is that "major appliances" reads like a single unit, but the words must be separated because one is used in the wordplay. "Last of" commonly means to take the final letter, so "last of major" likely gives R. Next comes "acquires," a common container, or insertion, indicator, meaning one set of letters goes inside another. Similar indicators include "takes on," "hugging" and "assumes," and the same idea can be phrased the other way round with words like "surrounding," "broken up by" and "lying about."

The column runs weekly, and newcomers to cryptics can expect more of these step-by-step explanations.