So, I was sitting down with the weekend crossword, the big one. Usually enjoy it, you know, a bit of a brain workout. Had my coffee, everything was going okay, filling in the easy ones first like always. Then I hit this one clue. Just stopped me dead.
It wasn’t even that complicated sounding. Something like “Old tool for smoothing wood” and it was just four letters. The crossing letters I had gave me S _ _ E. Easy, right? Should be. But nothing fit. I mean, what fits S _ _ E that smooths wood?
My first thought was, okay, maybe my crossing letters are wrong. Happens all the time. So I double-checked those clues. Nope, they seemed solid. One was “Opposite of fast” (SLOW) and the other was “Garden pest” (SLUG). Hard to argue with those. So the S and the L seemed right. S L _ E.
What wood smoothing tool is S L _ E? My mind went blank. Plane? No, wrong letters. Sander? Too long. Rasp? Nope. File? Nope.
I spent a good ten minutes just staring at it. Started getting annoyed. Felt like the puzzle was mocking me. You know that feeling?
- I tried thinking of old-timey words.
- I looked around my garage mentally for tools.
- I even started thinking maybe it’s some weird brand name?
Nothing. Zip. Nada.
This is where I usually get stubborn. I refused to look up the answer. That’s cheating, right? At least for the first hour. So, I put the puzzle down. Made more coffee. Paced around a bit. Complained to the cat, who didn’t care, obviously.
Going down the rabbit hole
Then I thought, maybe the definition is tricky. “Smoothing wood”. Could it be metaphorical? Like, smoothing things over? Nah, the crossing letters felt too concrete for wordplay there.
Fine. I caved. Not completely, but I decided to search around the clue. I searched online for “four letter wood smoothing tools”. Lots of stuff came up, but nothing fitting S L _ E. Then I tried “old four letter wood tools”. Still nothing jumped out.
This thing was really bugging me now. It felt personal. Like that time my old boss insisted a project timeline was “perfectly reasonable” when anyone with eyes could see it was impossible. You just know something’s off, but you can’t immediately pin it down.
I picked up the puzzle again. Stared at S L _ E. What if the clue wasn’t about a tool you hold, but something else? Like a process? No, “tool” is usually pretty direct.
Eventually, after another fifteen minutes of just pure frustration, I gave up my pride completely. Went to one of those crossword solver sites. Typed in S L _ E and the clue.
The answer it suggested? SLEE.
SLEE? What on earth is a SLEE? Never heard of it. Sounded made up. I searched for “SLEE tool”. Turns out, it’s some super obscure, possibly dialect-specific term for a type of wedge or block used in shipbuilding or something equally niche for smoothing or positioning. Seriously?
Well, that felt cheap
Honestly, finding the answer felt… anticlimactic. And kind of annoying. It wasn’t a clever wordplay I missed. It wasn’t a common word I’d forgotten. It was just some archaic, barely-used term the puzzle constructor probably dredged up from some dusty old dictionary. Felt like a dirty trick just to make the puzzle harder.
So yeah, I finished the crossword. But that one clue soured it a bit. It wasn’t satisfying. It was just… done. Sometimes the journey is the reward, they say. This time the journey was just irritation followed by a shrug. But hey, at least I learned a new, useless word. Maybe I can use SLEE in Scrabble someday and annoy someone else.
