Counterculture singer Phil / TUE 5-19-20 / View in order to mock or criticize perhaps

Constructor: Trent H. Evans

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:07)

THEME: Tom Swifties — ugh, it's a thing, look it up

Theme answers:

• WITH RELISH (17A: "This hot dog is absolute perfection!" said Tom ___)
• CRYPTICALLY (24A: "You're making a grave mistake," said Tom ___)
• LACKADAISICALLY (38A: "I can't find a flower fo 'She loves me, she loves me not," said Tom ___)
• OFF-HANDEDLY (47A: "I've learned my lesson about feeding the tigers," said Tom ___)
• MERCIFULLY (61A: "Many thanks for your help in Paris," said Tom ___)

Word of the Day: DDT (46A: Insecticide whose 1972 ban led to the comeback of the bald eagle) —

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, is a colorless, tasteless, and almost odorless crystalline chemical compound, an organochlorine. Originally developed as an insecticide, it became infamous for its environmental impacts. DDT was first synthesized in 1874 by the Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler. DDT's insecticidal action was discovered by the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller in 1939. DDT was used in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops. Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods".

By October 1945, DDT was available for public sale in the United States. Although it was promoted by government and industry for use as an agricultural and household pesticide, there were also concerns about its use from the beginning. Opposition to DDT was focused by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. It cataloged environmental impacts that coincided with widespread use of DDT in agriculture in the United States, and it questioned the logic of broadcasting potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment with little prior investigation of their environmental and health effects. The book cited claims that DDT and other pesticides had been shown to cause cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. Although Carson never directly called for an outright ban on the use of DDT, its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT's agricultural use in the United States. A worldwide ban on agricultural use was formalized under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, but its limited and still-controversial use in disease vector control continues, because of its effectiveness in reducing malarial infections, balanced by environmental and other health concerns.

Along with the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the United States ban on DDT is a major factor in the comeback of the bald eagle (the national bird of the United States) and the peregrine falcon from near-extinction in the contiguous United States. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle doesn't deserve a review, so I'm not gonna give it one. Well, not a full one, anyway. Here's the deal: Tom Swifties ... are an old thing. They are in corny old "joke" books, probably, and they are definitely on websites (over and over and over again). In the end, what you have are ... adverbs. Well, one adverbial phrase, and then adverbs. That's it. You (yes you) can go to a Tom Swifties page on the internet, just find a bunch of adverbs that will fit symmetrically in a grid, and bam, you have a "theme" now, congrats. There is literally nothing to this. This one, though, is so very bad because you don't have to go any further than The "Examples" of Tom Swifties on the "Tom Swifty" Wikipedia Page to find THREE FIFTHS of the themer set!!!

It's all so shabby. It should've been rejected. I MEAN, it should've been rejected on the premise alone (it's a hackneyed wordplay phenomenon that you can spin out endlessly). The fact that the constructor barely went past the wikipedia page for answers ... I dunno, man. The fill is mediocre. The long Downs are just fine. But this "theme" is a crime. If you don't think so, then by all means, flood the damn NYTXW with your Tom Swifty submissions. They are NOT HARD TO CONSTRUCT. Any experienced constructor could churn out several in an evening. The hardest part would be finding a symmetrical adverb set, and that ... isn't hard. Just go here and Get Started! (I'm joking, though, please don't do this).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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