Gemelo No. 21 – Half & Half

This is the first Gemelo “special” that calls upon the solver to manipulate the solutions in some unconventional fashion. The puzzle opens with these instructions:

Half & Half – In Seattle last year, I accidentally drank tea with “half & half” in it. It inspired this puzzle, in which half of the across answers are too long for their entries and continue in a down entry. The across clues for these provide definition and wordplay for their entries; the related down clues provide wordplay for their entries. Enumerations relate to the entry space.

As often happens with a lot of “special” instructions, this preamble requires a bit of cold-solving before making much sense. There are eighteen across and eighteen down clues, so it became apparent pretty quickly that nine of the across clues would pair with nine of the down clues to form the solutions indicated by the definitions provided in the “special” across clues, and in each case that neither the across nor the down components suggested by the wordplay were themselves actual words. For the “special” clues, I have provided the complete solution with the across clue, and provided cross-references with the associated down clue. Here is a list of the “special” pairs:

9A + 29D

11A + 3D

17A + 7D

18A + 22D

20A + 6D

23A + 14D

30A + 27D

32A + 1D

33A + 4D

I assumed that the remaining nine across and nine down clues were going to be “normal” (even though the preamble does not indicate one way or the other), and so they turned out to be.

I enjoyed this challenge. I suppose the result is a variant of the jigsaw-style puzzle, since we are left to infer where the latter portion of the “special” solutions must fit. Gemelo’s achievement is formidable, considering that he has resorted to only a few obscure words to fill out the grid, which includes one 21-letter word, the sesquipedalian chestnut ESTABLISHMENTARIANISM.