Flowers named after Greek physician of gods / THU 9-12-19 / Refrain from Mulan before with all force of great typhoon / 2001 title role for Audrey Tautou / Place in canopic jars say / Longtime staple of Thurs night TV

Constructor: Grant Thackray

Relative difficulty: Medium? (computer froze / rebooted in the middle, had to start over)

THEME: Q puns — familiar phrases respelled as Q-containing homophones, then clued wackily:

Theme answers:

• WIDOW'S PIQUE (19A: Fury at a husband leaving his entire estate to his mistress?)
• CLIQUE BAIT (25A: What an in-group uses for fishing?)
• THAT'S MY QUEUE (37A: "Oh, I'm supposed to be in the line over there?)
• BOOT LIQUOR (54A: Some alcohol smuggled into a rodeo, say?)
• MARQUEE MARK (59A: Smudge on a theater sign?)

Word of the Day: NO SOAP (68A: "Fuhgeddaboudit!") —

No luck; no chance; certainly not. (Often said as a response, indicating a total refusal orrejection.) Primarily heard in US. (thefreedictionary.com)

• • •

Solved first thing in the morning, which is never ever a good time for my brain to try processing wacky homophonic phrases, ugh. These are fine, though honestly it has taken me a while to see what, exactly, is *consistent* about this theme. Middle themer threw me because it wasn't a rewrite of a terminal "K" sound. It was an initial hard "C" instead, which, OK, is the same sound, technically, but spelled with a different letter and, in this case, at the front of the word, not the back. MARQUEE MARK was the hardest for me to get, because, like SEEST and ESSO and ERAT and NO SOAP, he is bygone. Also, on that one, the stress is on the wrong syLLAble, i.e. it's Mar' ky Mark but MARQUEE' MARK. This grid was 16 wide so that the even-numbered third themer could sit squarely in the middle. The fill was occasionally good (MAN OH MAN!) but mostly skewed toward dull and occasionally yuck. It's a super broken-up / segmented grid. Felt fussy to solve. Lots of short stuff with vague cluing. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't like it either. I'm going to leave off the evaluation portion of the program now, as INURN is really trying to make the case for "bad" and I don't want to let it (58A: Place in canopic jars, say).


NO SOAP is familiar to me because I like old-timey movies and expressions, but many people today are going to be wondering what the hell? "Fuhgeddaboudit!" is pretty contemporary, whereas NO SOAP is decidedly bygone, a relic from the early / mid 20th century. There's a good write-up on the idiom here. The salient quote from the article, though, is this: "From my vantage point in the UK, this classic Americanism appears to have largely died out, remembered and occasionally used only by older people" (worldwidewords). You have a responsibility to clue things in roughly equivalent fashion, and these clues don't feel equivalent to me, particularly in that one is current and one is not. I actually use the phrase NO DICE, but only use the phrase NO SOAP when talking about a regrettable restroom. 



Liked seeing RPG (not that I really like abbrs. that much, but the one for "role-playing game" is a familiar, common one I don't recall seeing very often). Didn't really like the clue on ONEA, but I'm never gonna like ONEA, no matter what clue you throw at it (15A: What Elvis Aaron Presley's middle name is spelled with on his birth certificate). "BE A MAN" probably shouldn't be in a grid with "MAN OH MAN"—certainly not in the same half of the grid. Oh, BARBQS is horrible-looking (4D: Some Labor Day events, informally). BAR-B-QS? How do you punctuate that? I think the plural is making it worse. That's all for today.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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