GC SF Sp WH BV YL BT CP SA CB CC Back to puzzle

Creative Pictures Studios

Foreign Box Office

by Mark Gottlieb
Answer: đź“š

This puzzle is about “false friends”—words in two different languages that look identical but are unrelated and mean different things. For example, the French word for “bread” is “pain.” This is clued at the top of the story (“a loyal friend—but when one isn’t true”), as well as by all the callouts of different places and nationalities.

The puzzle contains 25 sets of false friends, each between English and a different unique language. They are:

  • travel/busy in Oslo
  • make/to die in Honolulu
  • moron/carrots in Cardiff
  • ten/Croatian complexion
  • harp/war in Turkey
  • pain/French bread
  • slinks/lazy Latvian
  • once/eleven Spanish
  • hell/skewer in Albania
  • arched/coffin in Brittany
  • spurning/question in Reykjavik
  • mad/Danish food
  • ranting/branch from Jakarta
  • lump/Czech villain
  • MIT/with German
  • conqueror/to complain loudly in the Vatican
  • libel/dragonfly from Antwerp
  • farmer/Hungarian jeans
  • far/Romanian lighthouse
  • estate/summer in Tuscany
  • alas/down in Helsinki
  • alias/by the way in Lisbon
  • looming/creation from Estonia
  • transparent/banner in Warsaw
  • saga/button in Lithuania

When a pair is discovered, the solver must draw a line between the periods at the end of the false friends’ respective sentences. This is clued by “make connections,” “you have to draw the line,” and “focus on the period immediately following a friend’s revelation.”

The resulting picture is:

The answer is the BOOKS emoji (📚).