Okay, let me tell you about this morning’s little puzzle adventure. I was sitting down with my usual cup of coffee and the newspaper crossword. I enjoy these things, keeps the mind ticking over, you know?
Working Through The Puzzle
So, I was breezing through some of the clues, feeling pretty good about myself. Got the across ones sorted faster than usual. Then I hit a bit of a snag on one of the down clues. The clue itself was pretty straightforward, or so I thought: “kermit greeting”. Just three words.
My first thought immediately went to that little green fella. Kermit the Frog. What does he say? How does he greet people? I could almost hear his voice in my head, that slightly shaky, high-pitched tone. He often starts his bits with something like “Hi-ho, Kermit the Frog here!”.
So, “Hi-ho” seemed like the obvious answer. I looked at the grid. It needed four letters. H-I-H-O. Fits perfectly. That felt right.
Double Checking
Just to be sure, I checked the letters I already had in place from the across clues. There was an ‘H’ already there in the second spot. Hmmm. Wait. No, the clue was “kermit greeting”, four letters needed. My grid had _ _ H _. The second letter needed to be ‘I’, the third ‘H’, and the fourth ‘O’. My existing ‘H’ was actually the third letter. Perfect!
- First letter: H
- Second letter: I
- Third letter: H (already filled from an across clue, matched!)
- Fourth letter: O
So, I penciled in HIHO. It just clicked with the other words crossing it. Felt satisfying, like slotting the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place. It’s funny how these simple things work. You see a clue, your brain digs around in the filing cabinets, pulls out a memory – in this case, a famous frog’s catchphrase – and boom, you’ve got your answer.
Didn’t take long, but it was a fun little mental exercise to start the day. Just one of those small moments, you know? Figuring out a clue based on a puppet frog. Done and dusted.
