Moving vertically, horizontally (Preview)

Well Puzzlers, after a big fat fail last week (LOO --> 007; really??), I'm back with a breakdown of this week's Sunday Puzzle from NPR, and I'm feeling optimistic about this one:

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?

Starting off, let's note some suspicious wording here: "something that gets people moving vertically". Why not just say "something that moves people vertically"? Especially given that we later have "something that moves people horizontally". This clue has me wondering if it could be something a bit tricky or figurative. Alarm clock? Coffee? A fall? None of those work, but you get the idea.

Next, we're removing the middle two letters. That tells us right away that we need an even number of letters, because a word with an odd number of letters will only have one letter in the middle. Also, obviously, we know we're dealing with letters, so no sneaky numerals like last time.

Beyond that, we need to find candidate words. This is a classic transformation(string_a) = string_b puzzle, and in this case, string_a and string_b are both open class. Moreover, I don't think we're likely to find appropriate lists already assembled online, as the classes are rather vague. Instead, I suggest we assemble our own lists of candidate words, using Word2Vec, as we did in this past puzzle, which was a favorite. This means providing a list of seed words, like elevator and balloon for the string_a, and subway and bicycle for string_b. And if that doesn't do the trick, we can use SBERT in masking mode and ask it to fill in the blanks for sentences like I rode the [MASK] to the rooftop (for string_a) and It takes 15 minutes to reach the library by [MASK] (for string_b). In assembling these lists, we can reject any word that doesn't contain an even number of characters.

Once we've assembled our lists of candidate words, we can iterate through list A, applying the transformation---removing the middle two letters. Then we can check if the resulting string appears in list B. If so, we've most likely found our string_a and string_b.

I'll be back after the NPR submission deadline (Thursdays at 3pm ET) with my solution. Good luck, Puzzlers!