So, the other day, scrolling through my phone, you know how it is, and this thing pops up. Someone shared a text message thread, supposedly hilarious, and it had “nyt crossword” tagged onto it. Naturally, I stopped my scrolling. I do the crossword now and then, sometimes finish, sometimes stare blankly, depends on the day and how much coffee I’ve had.
Anyway, I opened the image. It wasn’t about the puzzle itself, not a clue or an answer being funny. It was this back-and-forth texting between two people, looked like maybe a couple or friends, getting completely tangled up because of autocorrect or just total misunderstanding while one of them was probably trying to ask about a crossword clue. One person is asking something innocent, the other replies with something completely off the wall, and it just spirals. Classic text mess-up.
My first reaction? A good chuckle. It wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, more like a ‘yep, seen that happen’ kind of funny. We’ve all been there, right? Autocorrect turning “See you soon” into “See you loon” or something equally weird. This one was particularly good, though, the way the confusion built up. You could almost feel the frustration through the screen captures.
So, what did I do? My “response,” if you want to call it that?
- First, I actually read the thread a couple of times to make sure I got the joke. Sometimes these things are subtle.
- Then, I thought about the NYT crossword itself. Did this relate to a recent puzzle? I hadn’t done it that day. Made a mental note to maybe check it out later, see if there was some clue that could possibly lead to this kind of mix-up.
- I didn’t share it widely. Felt like one of those things that’s amusing in the moment but maybe not worth blasting to everyone.
- Mostly, I just sat there for a minute, thinking about how weird communication is now with texts and autocorrect always jumping in. It’s efficient, sure, but man, it can go sideways fast.
The Crossword Connection Attempt
Later that evening, I did pull up that day’s NYT crossword. Went through the clues, looking for anything that might have sparked that bizarre text conversation. Found nothing obvious. Maybe the connection was looser, maybe the person who tagged it just thought it felt like the kind of brain-twisting confusion you get from a hard Saturday puzzle. Who knows.
So, the practice here wasn’t solving a puzzle based on the text, because the text wasn’t really about the puzzle content. The practice was more… observing. Observing the humor, the communication breakdown, and relating it back to my own little world of doing crosswords and dealing with glitchy phone moments. It didn’t lead to some grand insight. Just a funny little detour in the day, sparked by someone else’s texting woes linked, however tenuously, to the good old New York Times crossword.
Ended up just finishing the crossword like usual. Or, well, most of it. That bottom right corner was a killer.
