Moving vertically, horizontally (Solution)

Welcome back, Puzzlers! (Spoiler alert!) I'm back with a solution to this week's Sunday Puzzle from NPR:

This week's challenge: It comes from listener Ed Pegg Jr. Think of something that gets people moving vertically. Remove the middle two letters, and you get something that moves people horizontally. What two things are these?

In the preview post, I presented some ideas about how to approach this puzzle. In particular, I suggested using SBERT in masking mode to generate candidate words for the "something that gets people moving vertically." Well, I did manage to solve the puzzle (trampoline --> tram line), but unfortunately not by using NLP tools. The solution was sufficiently tricky that my SBERT queries did not turn up the correct candidate. I didn't upload a solver script this time, but in my SBERT queries I used verbs like ride, carry, and lift; naturally, these are not sufficiently likely to occur with trampoline.

Instead, I did this one the old fashioned way. I sat and brainstormed a list of things that move a person vertically, and eventually I landed (pun intended!) on trampoline, applied the "remove the middle two letters" transformation and recognized tram line. This was a neat puzzle. Next time I'll need to think more outside the box to ensure a language modeling tool like SBERT can turn up what I'm looking for. Probably adding a verb like bounce or launch would do the trick.

Okay, that's all for now. I'll see you tomorrow for the newest puzzle!

--Levi King