Ancient kingdom in modern-day Jordan / SUN 1-7-21 / Soul singer Bridges / Specialist publication for short / First Asian tennis player to be ranked #1 in singles / Celebrity who hold Guinness world record for Most Frequent Clapper

Constructor: Katie Hale and Christina Iverson

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Toddler Talk" — familiar phrases are redone with "W" sounds in place of "R" sounds, resulting in wacky phrases, clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style):
Theme answers:

• TAKE A WAYNE CHECK (24A: Accept payment from Batman?)
• AN ELEPHANT IN THE WOMB (31A: Cause for celebration at a pachyderm sanctuary?)
• HIT WOK BOTTOM (49A: Finish scooping out a big stir-fry?)
• GET WITCH QUICK (65A: Puritan's goal in 17th-century Salem?)
• THE WHEEL DEAL (86A: Something a Parmesan vendor might offer?)
• WEED BETWEEN THE LINES (100A: What a stoner actor smoked during rehearsal?)
• WHISKEY BUSINESS (111A: Domain for Jameson and Maker's Mark?)

Word of the Day: MOAB (77D: Ancient kingdom in modern-day Jordan) —

Moab (/ˈmoʊæb/) is the name of an ancient kingdom whose territory is today located in the modern state of Jordan. The land is mountainous and lies alongside much of the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. The existence of the Kingdom of Moab is attested to by numerous archaeological findings, most notably the Mesha Stele, which describes the Moabite victory over an unnamed son of King Omri of Israel, an episode also noted in 2 Kings 3. The Moabite capital was Dibon. According to the Hebrew Bible, Moab was often in conflict with its Israelite neighbours to the west. (wikipedia)

• • •

And so we return to earth. After a week of interesting and occasionally extraordinary puzzles, we get the same Sunday stuff we always get. Sound-change wackiness, writ large over a giant grid. I've certainly seen worse versions of this sort of thing. At least some of the themers are genuinely zany, if not LOL funny (GET WITCH QUICK is the winner of the day, for me). But baby talk, not something I enjoy or want to spend time with, thanks / no thanks. This theme is really thin, in that you do this sound-change thing with a ton of word pairs, and then for each of the "W" ones there are a theoretically infinite number of phrases you might find those words in. I mean, "rain" phrases alone must be pretty high in number. So the whole thing feels really slight, which means the themers really really (really) have to be exquisite in order for any of it to feel worthwhile. And I do think that some of the cluing really gives it the old college try (THE WHEEL DEAL isn't that interesting as a phrase, but the clue nearly rescues it, for instance). The concept just isn't that interesting to me, and the themers on the whole aren't funny / wacky enough. Plus, there's some wobbliness. It's "THE elephant in the room," not "AN elephant ..." Or, rather, that phrase would much much rather start THE than AN. You gotta do what you gotta do for symmetry's sake, but it still sounded weird to me with the indefinite article. Further, there's a "w" sound in QUICK that made me think it was gonna be involved in the sound-change theme (I had Q--CK first and I thought there was gonna be a "crack"-to-"QUACK" change there). They did a good job not having any unchanged "R"s in the themers, but that stray "w" sound threw me a bit. Also, what the stoner actor smoked was weed. He smoked weed. "Between the lines" was when he did it, but the clue doesn't ask for that. It asks for "What a stoner actor smoked during rehearsal." Grammatically, that clue wants a noun, and the noun is weed. He smoked weed. If there'd been an adjective before the noun, OK. But the prepositional phrase after: clunky and grammatically off, to my ears. The clue is really awkwardly written.

The fill on this one is ok but really very boring. Besides THE 'F' WORD (nice), there's nothing memorable here at all. It's almost all short and familiar, and what little longer stuff there is isn't terribly interesting. BEER BREWER feels ... I don't know, off, somehow. Redundant-y. I'd call said person either a "beer maker" or simply a "brewer." HERE'S TO is a really jarring partial, and, again, kudos to the clue for trying to make things right (19D: Slice of toast?), but nothing's gonna rescue HERE'S TO. There are no significantly difficult parts in this puzzle. You really can just run right through it. I had some slight trouble with OUTWEIGH (52D: Be more important than). It was only after I got it all from crosses and thought "that clue makes no sense" that I eventually realized "oh, no, as a metaphor for measuring, say, costs and benefits, it definitely makes sense." Beyond that, though, the only fight this puzzle put up was when I tried to parse NCAA GAME early on (when I had only the two "A"s), or when I had to leave a square blank because who can say if it's HEE haw or YEE haw (112D: "___-haw!") (actually, "HEE-Haw" is the title of a show and probably would have the "Haw" part capitalized, so ... at least I taught myself something today). Other than that, it's Monday-easy throughout. As Sundays go, this was better than average, but "average" is a dreary affair these days. Quaintness and corniness reign. I find myself wishing for bold failures instead of typical passable fare. Oh, I did enjoy full-named BO DEREK. If you didn't know the answer straight off (as I did not), then watching her name emerge from crosses was kind of fun. Like NCAA GAME, a parsing challenge. So there was some pleasure to be had. Just wish there'd been a lot more of it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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