Let wages wax, let wars wane; Editing the letters of the Bible; Board-certified brainy surgeons; Perennial plants & plumed critters; Capitals, bishops, aircraft, sports, child’s play

PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 6!π SERVED

Schpuzzle of the Week:

Board-certified brainy surgeons

Take the combined letters in the names of two popular board games, one which involves drawing cards from a deck. 

Rearrange this mix of letters to spell two nouns: one describing a pre-op surgeon and
another naming tools a surgeon may use. 

What are these two board games and two nouns?

Appetizer Menu

Worldplayful Appetizer:

Capitals, bishops, aircraft, sports, child’s play

Casting out nines

1.🎣 Think of a US state capital. Subtract nine. Rearrange the result to obtain a communications device. 

What are the capital and device?

Add an R

2.➕Think of the Spanish and Mexican capital
of California. 

Add an R to obtain the name of a large city in Mexico.

Split Synonyms

3.🪓 Think of a term for certain bishops. 

A more familiar meaning of this word applies to a subset of all bishops. What is this word? 

To which bishops does its more familiar meaning not apply?

Cart before the crash

4.🤸Think of something that is applied to an aircraft in certain situations. Switch the first and last letters to describe what could have happened to an aircraft to which this material was not applied.

Two meanings => two phrases

5.📚 Think of a two-word phrase that has different meanings in two unrelated sports.

Rearrange the letters of this phrase to yield (1) a possible 2-word description of the US national anthem; or (2) a conceivable situation report during the Battle of the Bulge.

Pediatric surgery

6.🚸Think of a word included in a common redundant phrase. Remove four adjacent letters to obtain a shorter second word often associated with servers or votes. Insert an apostrophe and a space into the four letters to form a sentence in a children’s game. What are the original and shortened words and the sentence in the children’s game?

MENU

Corinthians Galatians Thessalonians Slice:

Editing the letters of the Bible

Take a noun for a church official and a verb for one of the many things he can do. Move the fourth letter of the verb to the end of the verb. 

Now take a duplicate of the last letter the noun for the church official. Place this duplicate letter at the very end of the verb that you altered. 

After all this manipulation and editing of letters, the verb is now an adjective that describes certain numbers. 

The noun for the church official also happens to be an adjective that describes certain numbers. 

What are these adjectives?

What can the church official do?

Riffing Off Shortz And Baggish Slices:

Let wages wax, let wars wane

Will Shortz’s January 30th NPR Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle, created by Steve Baggish of Arlington, Massachusetts, reads:

Think of a familiar two-word phrase meaning “to fight.” Change the third letter of each word to get two new words that are opposites of each other. What words are these?

Puzzleria!s Riffing Off Shortz And Baggish Slices read:

ENTREE #1

Think of a familiar puzzle-maker, first and last names. Change the third letter of each word – to an “a” and to an “n”, respectively – to get two new words. 

The first means: “to fight,” “to smash a hole in,” or “to crush or break inward.”

The second is not really a word that appears in dictionaries, but if it were it would mean something like: “inclined or liable to strike sharply, and to knock, hit, or thrust vigorously often with a sharp noise.” 

Who is the puzzle-maker?

What words are these?

ENTREE #2

Think of a somewhat familiar two-word phrase, in five and three letters, meaning “to be particularly eager or enthusiastic for something, especially a fight, disagreement, or conflict.” 

Change the first two letters of the first word to an “b” and “r” to form a word that means “to
battle or brawl.”

Change the third letter of the second word to an “o” to form a word that precedes the word “Fighters” in a phrase used by Allied aircraft pilots during World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters of operations.

The phrase is also associated with Nirvana.

What is the somewhat familiar two-word phrase, in five and three letters?

What is the word that means “to battle or brawl?”

What was the phrase used by Allied aircraft pilots?

ENTREE #3

Think of a familiar two-word phrase, in five and six letters, meaning “to fight.” 

Change the third letter of both words to an “a”. Change the the first letter of the first word to a “g”.

The result is a pair of synonyms of “lawn.”

What is this two-word “fighting” phrase?

What are the synonyms of lawn?

Hint: The familiar two-word phrase meaning “to fight” – minus an “s” and a space – is something with which Will Shortz is very familiar. 

ENTREE #4

Think of a familiar two-word phrase meaning “to fight.” 

Change no letters, but replace the space with a hyphen and place an apostrophe between the last two letters.

The result is a term that means “belonging to the buddy of Beavis.”

What two-word phrase and hyphenated term are these?

ENTREE #5

Think of a familiar two-word phrase meaning “to fight or attack, especially verbally.” 

Change the third letter of each word – to a “w” and to an “f”, respectively – to get two new words that describe the content of “Family Court Review,” “ABA Journal Magazine” and “The National Jurist Magazine”. 

What is the two-word phrase?

What are the two new words?

ENTREE #6

Think of a familiar two-word phrase, in four and five letters, meaning “to fight.”  

Change the third letter of the first word to an “o” to get a new word that follows “Stop” and
precedes “Listen” on signs you sometimes see on street or railroad crossings as a warning to check and make sure no car or train is coming.

The second word in the familiar two-word phrase is what you might be “listening” for at street or railroad crossings.

What is the two-word phrase?

What is the word that follows “Stop” and precedes “Listen?”

ENTREE #7

Think of a familiar two-word phrase, in four and three letters, meaning “to fight.” Change the third letter of each word to get two new words. The first is what a human does with an appendage to express a warm greeting. 

The second is what a canine does with an
appendage to express a warm greeting.

What is the familiar two-word phrase?

What does a human do and with what appendage?

What does a canine do and with what appendage?

ENTREE #8

Think of a familiar two-word phrase meaning “to write quicky.” 

Change the third letter of the first word and the second letter of the second word to get two new words: a slang term for a beverage, and the time of day many people drink this beverage. 

What four words are these?

ENTREE #9

Think of a familiar two-word phrase meaning “to write quicky, as a student or news reporter might do.” 

Change the first letters in each word to get an
allegation former president Donald Trump made, and still makes, in the wake of his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. 

What is the two-word phrase?

What does Donald Trump allege?

Dessert Menu

Rhyme Of A Synonym Dessert:

Perennial plants & plumed critters

Name a three-word term for a perennial plant... or a plumed creature. 

An example of the first of the three words rhymes with a synonym of the third of the three words. 

What are this three-word term and two rhyming words?

Every Friday at Joseph Young’s Puzzleria! we publish a new menu of fresh word puzzles, number puzzles, logic puzzles, puzzles of all varieties and flavors. We cater to cravers of scrumptious puzzles!

Our master chef, Grecian gourmet puzzle-creator Lego Lambda, blends and bakes up mysterious (and sometimes questionable) toppings and spices (such as alphabet soup, Mobius bacon strips, diced snake eyes, cubed radishes, “hominym” grits, anagraham crackers, rhyme thyme and sage sprinklings.)

Please post your comments below. Feel free also to post clever and subtle hints that do not give the puzzle answers away. Please wait until after 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesdays to post your answers and explain your hints about the puzzles. We serve up at least one fresh puzzle every Friday.

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