Rapid movement of eye from one point to another / SUN 6-30-19 / Wife in F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night / Last Oldsmobile ever produced / Tropical scurrier / Sturdily built friend on Friends

Constructor: Emily Carroll

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:17, my second-fastest Sunday time)

THEME: "Flip 'phones" — theme answers are imaginary phrases made up of two two-syllable terms. Second term is just the first term with the syllables reversed (i.e. "flipped") (and respelled):

Theme answers:

• KNEE-HIGH HEINIE (23A: Low end?)
• TEA TREE TREATY (48A: Agreement for exporting essential oils?)
• BOW-TIE TAE BO (63A: Exercise program done in formal attire?)
• BEEFY PHOEBE (77A: Sturdily built friend on "Friends"?)
• TOUCHY CHEETAH (93A: Spotted animal with a lot of sore spots?)
• LOAFER FURLOUGH (118A: Cause of a work stoppage at a shoe factory?)

Word of the Day: SACCADE (76D: Rapid movement of the eye from one point to another) —

A saccade (/səˈkɑːd/ sə-KAHD, French for jerk) is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction. In contrast, in smooth pursuit movements, the eyes move smoothly instead of in jumps. The phenomenon can be associated with a shift in frequency of an emitted signal or a movement of a body part or device. Controlled cortically by the frontal eye fields (FEF), or subcortically by the superior colliculus, saccades serve as a mechanism for fixation, rapid eye movement, and the fast phase of optokinetic nystagmus. The word appears to have been coined in the 1880s by French ophthalmologist Émile Javal, who used a mirror on one side of a page to observe eye movement in silent reading, and found that it involves a succession of discontinuous individual movements. (wikipedia)

• • •

I rarely find myself thinking "this theme could've been denser," but, well, this theme could've been denser. Six answers feels awfully thin for a Sunday of this particular theme type (where surely there were more apt answers out there to be found). That said, I need to be careful what I wish for, because I actually found the grid delightfully smooth, and extra themers could very well have gummed that up, so ... I'll just take the meager portions here and be grateful, I guess. KNEE-HIGH HEINIE makes absolutely no sense on any level (even a joke level), so though I like the sing-songiness of the answer, that's an issue. I can imagine a TOUCHY CHEETAH, I cannot even imagine a KNEE-HIGH HEINIE. Is it someone else's heinie? That only comes up to your knees? So ... like a child's ... heinie. This is an odd way to think about ... children. Or short people? Dolls? I really don't know. But the other absurd answers are absurd in a pleasantly wacky way. I really like that all the reversals in these themers involve respellings, so you're not just switching syllables, but changing their form in every case.


The puzzle was astonishingly easy, though. I don't know if that's such a bad thing on Sundays, which tend to feel like chores to me. But one thing the overall easiness did was make SACCADE stand out. Hard. Perhaps that was a familiar term to you, but for me it may as well have been random letters. The only reason I didn't break my Sunday record was that answer (I mean, probably). I actually had it as SACCADO for a bit (playing off of "staccato"?), which then made NO HELP harder to get than it should've been (112A: Utterly useless). Rest of the grid felt completely free of obscurities. Even if you don't know who YVES Tanguy is (I did) (78D: Surrealist Tanguy) or who NICOLE Diver is (I didn't) (21A: Wife in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night"), you at least know that YVES and NICOLE are names. I don't know what a SACCADE is. Well, I guess I do, now. But you see what I mean.


Let's see ... really annoyed at myself for thinking the Mariners still had an "M" on their caps (19D: Symbol on a Mariners cap). Weird to think of the simple letter "S" (ESS) as a "symbol" but yeah I guess it is. I was thinking of the letter "M" but mainly I was thinking trident (which is what the "M" used to be shaped like):

BAD AREA rubbed me slightly the wrong way, since it sounds like like something gentrifiers call a place before they gentrify it (33A: Part of town that may be dangerous). Baffled by ONEISH when all I had was ONEI-- (52A: Around an hour after noon). "GAG ME" really needs some kind of qualifier like "in the '80s" or "according to Moon Unit Zappa" or something because I don't think anyone's said it in earnest, in a non-ironic, non-deliberately retro kind of way since 1984. Still like the phrase, though. If you google ["GAG ME"] your first hits will all be for "GAG ME with a spoon," which is valspeak (or Valley Girl-speak), a sociolect that reached peak popularity / influence sometime between Frank Zappa & Moon Unit Zappa's "Valley Girl" (1982) and the movie "Valley Girl" (1983), both of which are iconic and excellent.



As for wrong turns, I somehow considered OPED for 82A: Statement often starting "I ..." (OATH), and I was convinced that a good chunk of a sci-film's budget might go to ETS. I guess I was close-ish. They do make ETS with CGI (116D: Part of a sci-fi film's budget). That's it. Happy Sunday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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