BOWLED OVER

I intuited quickly that Sylvia Bursztyn and Barry Tunick were trying to trick me with 14 Down (“knock the socks off of”) in last Sunday’s Puzzler.

Obviously, they wanted me to identify the syntactical blunder, not paraphrase the clue. When it became evident that “tautology” was one letter too long, and “dangling preposition” wasn’t even close, I realized, to my horror, that they weren’t kidding. They really meant to say “off of.”

Astonishing.

RICH EUSTIS

Hidden Hills