TAUSIG: Thanks for straight-up ignoring my dad joke in the comment above, Finn.

VIGELAND: Dad jokes are so second nature to me, I don’t notice them. Back to our theme! The phrase TENURE TRACK has a funny surface sense as a song about getting job security as a professor. Plus, it’s also 11 letters long, which matches PUZZLE PIECE and thus advances our grid symmetry mission.

TAUSIG: Yes! I love this, and not only because it’s a song I’m hoping to sing someday. This is a solid entry, just like PUZZLE PIECE, because the sense of “track” changes, and it does so in a way that takes us far from the original meaning of “track.” I will note, however, that the sense of “tenure” does not change. It would be even funnier if it did, but there’s no sense of “tenure” outside of the professorial one that is common enough for us to use. Still, the entry is goofy in all the right ways.

Use the Resources, Luke

VIGELAND: Let’s go to two wonderful resources now, OneLook.com and XWordInfo.com/Finder, in order to look up other phrases that end with the word NUMBER. I just enter “*NUMBER” in the query and a whole lot of phrases pop up. The asterisk before NUMBER asks the database to show us all phrases that end with NUMBER and begin with anything else. If I want only four-letter words in the first position, I could type in “???? NUMBER.” Each question mark here represents a letter — that’s the grammar of these search engines. There are even more complex searches you can do once you get the hang of it.

Among others, I got PRIME NUMBER, FAX NUMBER and WRONG NUMBER. They’re all fine, but aren’t particularly funny. We have other options that amuse me more: CARDINAL NUMBER (14), BACON NUMBER (11) and CALL NUMBER (10). A 14-letter theme entry is not ideal in a 15 by 15 grid (the black square that would accompany it in the 15-letter-wide row limits where the entry can be placed in the grid), and while BACON NUMBER is quite funny, the base phrase’s meaning (how many degrees of separation you are from the actor Kevin Bacon) might not be familiar to all solvers, so let’s try CALL NUMBER.