This One And That One Nyt Decoding The Headlines And What They Miss

How I Actually Approach "This One And That One" Theme Crosswords

I've been solving the NYT crossword for about seven years now, and the "This One and That One" style theme has tripped me up more than I'd like to admit. It's not hard once you get it, but getting there takes a specific kind of pattern recognition that most solvers don't really talk about. When you see a theme with that phrasing in the New York Times, the constructor is almost always playing on demonstrative pronouns paired with something else — usually musical notes, or sometimes just pointing and labeling jokes. The fill might say "THIS ONE" across three cells and the answer is DO. Or "THAT ONE" and the answer is RE. It's a pun on the actual words themselves being pointed at. I learned this the hard way during a Saturday puzzle in late 2022. The theme entry was a big boxed answer that basically read like a list of items being labeled, and every time I hit one I assumed it was a straightforward clue. It took me until 10 PM that night to realize the entire theme was just musical notes disguised as casual pointing language. I spent roughly forty-five minutes on that single theme entry before it clicked. Don't make the same mistake.

The Structural Pattern You Need to Look For

Here's what's actually happening under the hood. The constructor picks a small set of words — usually five or seven items from a familiar category — and then rewrites normal clues so the answer *sounds* like a phrase someone would say while pointing at things. In the case of musical notes, you're looking for DO RE MI FA SO LA TI hiding inside what appear to be completely unrelated clues. The key insight nobody mentions is that these clues rarely, ever contain the actual answer word. If the answer is DO and the clue says "This one here," that's too obvious. A better constructor will write something like "First violinist's pitch" where DO is the answer but it feels like a legit music trivia question. The trick is recognizing that the *surface reading* of the clue is a misdirection. The real parsing happens when you notice the theme entries all share a grammatical pattern — they all sound like someone identifying objects in a room. Most online solvers will tell you to look for repeated structural patterns in theme answers. That's correct but incomplete. The more useful thing to do is look at the *answers you already have locked in* across the theme entries and ask whether they all belong to one tiny category. If three theme answers are musical notes and the fourth one is also a musical note, you've identified the theme before you've even fully solved it. This usually cuts solving time down from twenty minutes to about six for the theme portion alone.

Where This Approach Breaks Down

I need to be straight with you: this method only works for the specific "demonstrative + category member" theme type. If the constructor is doing something different — like a linked theme where answers cross-reference each other in a chain — then scanning for pointing language will waste your time. I've seen "This One and That One Nyt" style puzzles fail completely when the actual mechanism was something closer to a palindrome grid or a hidden message along the diagonals. The puzzle industry calls these "hidden themes" and they look nothing like the straightforward theme-entry method I described above. Another limitation is that the musical note variant specifically is extremely overused. I count at least twelve separate appearances in the Sunday puzzle alone over a two-year span. When you see that many repeats, your confidence in this particular theme should stay moderate. Constructors sometimes recycle the same mechanism with different categories — colors, months, days of the week — and the solving strategy is identical but the answer set changes entirely. I recommend keeping a mental checklist of common categories rather than fixating on notes.

My Actual Solving Workflow

Here's what I do now when I suspect this theme type. I scan the grid for any answer that looks like a single syllable or a two-syllable word that could function as both a label and a category member. When I find three or more of those, I test the hypothesis by checking whether the across and down clues for those entries can be parsed two ways — literally and figuratively. If they can, I'm probably in theme territory. Then I look at the remaining unsolved theme entries and ask: what category contains all of these answers plus one or two I haven't placed yet? This is where most people get stuck because they try to solve each clue individually instead of treating the whole set as a group. I'll leave four or five non-theme clues unsolved temporarily while I finish the theme block. It feels backwards but it actually speeds everything up. The non-theme fill tends to fall into place once the theme anchors are locked down, since the theme entries often intersect with important crossing letters. If you want to practice this specifically, the best resource is still the NYT crossword archive going back to 2015. Search for theme entries containing DO, RE, MI, or similar monosyllabic words in what appear to be unrelated clues. You'll start seeing the pattern everywhere once you've trained your eye for it. I usually spend about ten minutes a day on this exercise and it improved my Saturday puzzle completion rate noticeably within a month.