Violinist Leopold / SUN 3-1-20 / Old Spanish bread / Waterside lodging with portmanteau name / Rowing machine in fitness lingo / 1910s flying star / Overseas landmark located in Elizabeth Tower / Chocolaty post cereal / Literary protagonist named after king of Israel / Noted Chinese-American fashion designer / Payment to a freelancer for unpublished work

Constructor: Sam Trabucco

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium (10:15)

THEME: "Letter Dictation" — Phrases that have words that sound like letters in them are clued as if they related to the letter ... so the (all-caps) clue is a literal representation of the answer, if the answer is taken as an auditory pun referring to a letter of the alphabet. Thus:

Theme answers:

• SPLIT PEA SOUP (20A: GAZACHO) ("gazpacho" is a "soup" from which the "P" has "SPLIT")
• GIVE THE STINK EYE (29A: SMEILL) ("smell" is a "stink" to which an "I" has been given)
• LONG TIME NO SEE (47A: ENTURIES) ("centuries" is a "LONG TIME" in which there is no "C")
• OH BY THE WAY (62A: TECHNIQUEO) ("technique" is a "WAY" that the letter "O" is sitting "by")
• YEAH WHY NOT (66A: DEFINITEL) ("definitely" is a word meaning "yeah" only here the "Y" is "NOT" (present))
• BE IN THE MOMENT (82A: INSTBANT) ("instant" is a "moment" and "B" is "IN" it)
• GREEN TEA EXTRACT (96A: ENVIRONMENAL) ("environmental" means "green" but here the "T" has been "EXTRACT(ed)")
• ARE YOU WITH ME? (110A: RUMYSELF) ("R" and "U" w/ "myself," i.e. "ME")

Word of the Day: Leopold AUER (72A: Violinist Leopold) —

Leopold von Auer (Hungarian: Auer Lipót; June 7, 1845 – July 15, 1930) was a Hungarian violinist, academic, conductor and composer, best known as an outstanding violin teacher. [...] Auer is remembered as one of the most important pedagogues of the violin, and was one of the most sought-after teachers for gifted students. "Auer's position in the history of violin playing is based on his teaching." Many notable virtuoso violinists were among his students, including Mischa Elman, Konstanty Gorski, Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Toscha Seidel, Efrem Zimbalist, Georges Boulanger, Benno Rabinof, Kathleen Parlow, Julia Klumpke, Thelma Given, Sylvia Lent, Kemp Stillings, and Oscar Shumsky. Among these were "some of the greatest violinists" of the twentieth century. (wikipedia)

• • •

I'm going to start by doing something I never do; I'm going to quote another crossword blog. This is from Jeff Chen at xwordinfo: "NO LIKEY … that feels like something okay for me to say [...] Not sure if Sam gets the same pass." I am on a social media fast for Lent, so I cannot do what I normally do when an answer makes me wince, which is go on Twitter and confirm that someone, anyone, heard what I heard. I think I audibly shouted at "NO LIKEY" when I got it. I think what I shouted was "Nooooooo." It is a phrase that reeks of Chinglish, i.e. a kind of mocking fake-Asian speak. The phrase "Me NO LIKEY" would drive that point home a little harder, perhaps, but dropping the "Me" does not in anyway erase the connotations of racial mockery. I get that not everyone will have these associations. But as you can see from Jeff's (very mild) response, NO LIKEY is gonna read as racial caricature to a *bunch* of solvers, and someone, somewhere along the line—for sure, the editor, if no one else—should've said "no" to this, should've recognized that this is potentially problematic language, should've foreseen that it would go down badly-to-very-badly with some subset of solvers. I would be agasp and agog and all the a-words if *none* of test-solvers raised this as a potential issue. Mostly I'm genuinely aghast that the editor is so bad at his job. That his ear is so tin. That he just doesn't care. And that the NYT as an institution just doesn't care. This isn't a one-time thing. He's barely one year off from the whole BEANER incident, for god's sake. He can't keep stumbling into racism and then claiming he didn't know any better. To claim that NO LIKEY is just an [Informal "Ugh!"] ... I dunno, man. I just don't know.


The theme? It's clever. It works. It's fine. Much of the rest of the puzzle, however, feels off (yet again). "HOPE TO GOD!" is not a stand-alone phrase, and therefore absolutely does Not swap out for 2D: "With any luck!" ... [Wish desperately], that would work for HOPE TO GOD. Further, the phrase is "all or nothing." ALL OR NONE is just awkward (3D: Uncompromising). OREOOS is somehow more irksome than just plain OREO. Way way more irksome. Constructors are using it all the time now, trying to seem clever when all they are is desperate for more vowels. As I've said before, GENYERS is not now and will never be a thing. They're "millennials" and that is all that they are. You might be able to get away with just GEN Y, as that had currency for maybe a hot second, but GENYERS is gruesome. No one knows who Leopold AUER is. Just keepin' it real. I mean, I do, because I had to do this whole AUER investigation way back when (circa 2007) when there was massive AUER confusion around which AUER was the violinist and which was the (somewhat better known) actor? Mischa, I think?? Yes, that's it.


BOATEL remains a deeply dumb word (95D: Waterside lodging with a portmanteau name). What the hell is a BLEEP CENSOR?? (64D: Curse remover). I get that curses are bleeped on network TV (say) and that that is a form of censorship, but is BLEEP CENSOR someone's job?? Is it a machine? Bizarre. SMOKE RINGs are not at all hard to blow (40D: Something that's not easy to blow). I blew them all the time when I smoked. For a while, I was convinced that it was the primary reason I smoked. Diverting. Meditative. Then I went to the doctor at age 21 for some unrelated thing and he asked if I smoked and I was like "... yes" and he just looked at me like "you ****ing idiot" and I was like "I know, I know" and I quit the next month. I don't miss it, but I do miss the rings a little. I had DAS before AGS (109D: Chief legal officers: Abbr.) and NBC before BBC (60A: Original airer of "The Office"), which was the closest thing to a pitfall in this whole puzzle. That's because I was certain about NBC, which was the original airer of the *US* version of "The Office." So I didn't change that "N" which meant I couldn't see BEAST and since I couldn't remember YANN I had a real snafu on my hands in the heartland of the grid. Two themers were implicated. But I figured Grendel had to be a BEAST (60D) and finally extricated myself from there. Really liked D-WADE (86D: Nickname of the Miami Heat's all-time leader in points, games, assists and steals) and KILL FEE (51A: Payment to a freelancer for unpublished work) as answers. Nice stuff. But nothing but nothing had any hope of getting the awful taste of NO LIKEY out of my mouth.



Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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