No way that's purple: the NYT Connections thread

I got it perfect reverse rainbow: though Angers isn't a place I know and I didn't know the PBS category, green and yellow were quite easy and Angers was the only likely sounding place that remained so the whole thing only took me 4 mins I think

reverse rainbow too. didn't actually spot the parties - i'm hopeless at the ones where you have to add a word! but i had an inkling about frontline and masterpiece (just as 'some kind of american tv thing') and the other two were by far the most likely to fit.

didn't have a clue about the Blue group but got all of the others easily enough

It got a 5/5 rating on the Connections Bot calculus so ilx has overperformed today

I would have trouble trying to go for reverse rainbow because I can never really see what is meant to distinguish the three easy ones from each other (and I don’t remember the order of the colours). Purple are easy to spot because they tend to be of a few particular types but you could put the others in any order & I’d be like ok sure

Yeah I think it helps that it's the same setter each day as you have to kind of get inside her head. I do quite often get yellow and green in wrong order

I liked that the word choices today started with Champagne Super and Nova. Wonder if the setter is an Oasis fan?

Reunion was in there too

Probably a good way to kick things off for a puzzle-maker, take current headlines and search for double meanings.

i got the PBS one first, then green yellow purp

imo today's purple was the ideal version. some common words that could fit with other categories in the puzzle but also have non-obvious second meaning

I almost submitted the Oasis row as a guess because it made me laugh

Haha yeah thats what I was referring to further up. When I see something like that I have to immediately hit shuffle, otherwise it throws me off.

Nothing distinguishing the colours at all today, purple as straightforward as the rest

I found today very tricky and didn't see purple at all but I seem to be in a minority

No mistakes but took me while before I was confident of ignoring the steaks and I was worried that "way!" or "real!" somehow belonged with blue, so no reverse rainbow

I think a lot of people fell for that today (my gf and I both did)

The misdirections are the most fun things about this puzzle, there was a fake group recently of anagrams of crate. You have to give it the extra few seconds before jumping in

OK the choice of colours in today's was properly screwy. Purple genuinely the easiest and green was leftovers for me that I just could not see. I guess it didn't help that I'm not familiar with this sense of parcel

agree purple easiest today. i had blue as leftovers.

lol I got blue right away. Actually I thought today was pretty easy?

reverse rainbowed today for me

lol I got blue right away. Actually I thought today was pretty easy?

Connections mind meld, I had the same experience (even though purple was the last for me).

Because previous puzzles had categories of cartoon characters , I got that one first, even though it’s one of those things I rarely think about… like golf.

My first RR today!

Phew, today's was a struggle but limped home with one error to spare.

Today (Weds) had some sneaky sames. I also had to googlecheat one of the purple answers because I knew it was "derby" but whoever heard of a baseball derby not me thats who.

Today was certainly an FU to non-Americans. Managed to get it with only one mistake but a lot of guessing

busted. got the yellows and 'one away' for each of the others. never heard of a ??? broil, home run derby rings a bell now maybe. might have got the paint job if I'd been sharper but i don't feel too had as yes, this one was very american.

i got them all, no mistakes, but had to guess at some of them

Got it with one mistake — guessed roller derby instead of home run, which I’d never heard of.

I know Philly cheesesteak and Buffalo wings, but what cities have sprouts and broil?

Brussels and London

We definitely don't, though

you don't what?

oh I think I know what you mean. well, the problem is hd's paraphrase of the category is inaccurate; as stated it's perfectly fine afaict

Drop cloth also not a phrase I've heard over here - we call them dust sheets

I'm not really complaining about the US-centricism btw - let the New York Times be the New York Times. But it does add another dimension to the puzzle!

very US-centric words today. So as US-based player I found this one very easy.

I remember giving up completely on Connections when it turned out that every other clue was "jelly roller" or "nose bagger" or some impenetrable US slang. As you point out it's the New York Times, written in New York for a US audience. But if it was a British thing, would literally every single clue - literally every single clue - be "jolly ha'pence" or "knobbly nappers" or "hampstead hatrack"? No.

Which really raises two possibilities. The first is that the United States has much more slang, and it's more ever-present, than the rest of the English-speaking world, which is nonsense because the country is only two hundred years old. The second is that the writers are only familiar with US slang, except that as far as I know the puzzles are AI-generated, and presumably their dataset includes far more slang-light content than slang-heavy.

The third is that the NYT believes that the US audience wants to read about itself 24/7, and would get nervous and scared if it wasn't bombarded with its own culture all the time. Except that I've always had the impression that in the United States, New York - and by extension the NYT - is perceived as a separate entity, a kind of controlling alien parasite, an ingratiating imitation of the United States, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers - so why bother? It's as if the NYT is trying to pretend to be a regular guy, but in a really obvious way, "hello fellow kids". And that's what angers me. My own mind! It angers me.

You son of a... I have never in my LIFE heard of one of the terms in the purple category today.

I never made the connection between Brussels the city and Brussels the sprout! Feeling dense.

Still never heard of a London Boil, tho.

orbit, was it soap box?

Haha yes ___ sprouts threw me too because I was thinking "what city is called Bean?" and felt like an idiot when I worked it out.

it was London BROIL iirc, which is even worse as no British person uses the word "broil" and in fact some people even have a deep-seated hatred towards it

got today's ok but it needed a bit of thinking

Quite a Finbarr Saunders set of words today

Even though I got it in 4, I thought today was pretty tricky because 75% of the words seemed particularly vague.

I found the double entendres very distracting, yes. And otherwise vague.

I guess I dont need to spoiler 25th's anymore but I only knew "london broil" thanks to the Simpsons. (PVMIC)

I only know it from Cabin Boy.

A nicely challenging reverse rainbow on what Connections says is my 100th puzzle. Not sure if I lost earlier ones from my phone or whether NYT didn't collect the data before that. 96/100 completed, 74 with no mistakes.

https://i.imgur.com/HaCu1Dt.jpeg

Is there a technique for solving these or do people just let the words settle in their mind until possible answers jump out?

The more challenging versions of these give me that the same panic/anxiety of turning over an exam paper to begin and not being able to answer a single question. The pleasure of these is very much in having completed them.

^^same except switch G and Y, toughie!

xBYGP

fairly straightforward after the red herring was eliminated

Is the Green category slightly flakey, or is it just me? Indicate, as emotions: Betray, Display, and Express -ok.... Register seems a bit different ? Is that indicating?

@Bob Six: Merriam Webster's 4th definition of "register" (verb) is "to convey an impression of : express." My example would be: "Her face registered a smile."

turns out I plain forgot to do this yesterday - oh well, adios streak

#1092 (SUN) PBYG -- Swapped things in and out of 4 seemingly plausible categories. Finally tried a slightly different slant on what turned out to be P.