Curry made with hoof meat / THU 6-3-21 / Relatives of glockenspiels / Biblical name repeated in Faulkner title / Peanuts character with glasses

Constructor: Kyra Wilson and Sophia Maymudes

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: DOUBLE DOWN (22D: Strengthen one's commitment ... and a hint to four answers in this puzzle) — four two-word theme answers follow the pattern "double ___"; the second word is the only one that appears in the grid, and it appears ... double, i.e. each letter appears in it square as a double letter; the letters need to be doubled in order for the crosses to work:

Theme answers:

• DDAATTEESS (2D: Candlelit dinners for four, say)
• OOVVEERR (11D: React to a gut punch, perhaps)
• TTRREE (62D: Hotel chain operated by Hilton)
• AAGGEENNTT (59D: Spy with questionable loyalty)

Word of the Day: LOGIA (58D: Sayings attributed to Jesus) —

The term logia (Greek: λόγια), plural of logion (Greek: λόγιον), is used variously in ancient writings and modern scholarship in reference to communications of divine origin. In pagan contexts, the principal meaning was "oracles", while Jewish and Christian writings used logia in reference especially to "the divinely inspired Scriptures". A famous and much-debated occurrence of the term is in the account by Papias of Hierapolis on the origins of the canonical Gospels. Since the 19th century, New Testamentscholarship has tended to reserve the term logion for a divine saying, especially one spoken by Jesus, in contrast to narrative, and to call a collection of such sayings, as exemplified by the Gospel of Thomas, logia. (wikipedia)

• • •

Excellent expression of the revealer phrase. Didn't give me too much of an aha, since I figured out the gimmick before ever leaving the NW corner, but still, I'm impressed by the execution of the concept. Constructors are always looking around for phrases that they can reimagine in crossword theme form. Like maybe GO OVERBOARD would get you a theme where the letters GO "appear" outside the bounds of the grid. You know, see a phrase, think it's interesting, and then noodle around with it a bit to see if you can't get a good wordplay concept out of it. I like today's theme because it not only has all the "double" phrases going "Down," it requires that the second word in each phrase be literally doubled in order to make sense of all the Acrosses. It's got layers, complexity, this theme. It does feel a little thin, in the sense that there are just these four little words involved (of course they're little only because the word "double" has been left out and the doubled letters have been Double Stuf'd into single squares. But 14 squares is not a hell of a lot of theme real estate. And the theme answers are so short and so segmented off that they feel like these teeny, easy-to-solve, off-to-the-side puzzles. Like they haven't been really stirred in all the way. But it seems like trying to cram more theme in (in the east and west sections, say) would've been very difficult and possibly disastrous. Better to lay off the theme a little and have it come out clean than get overly ambitious with the theme and end up with a grid that's awkward or clunky. Having almost all the theme crosses be very short means you do end up in crosswordesey territory a bunch (NAAN DEERE ESSENE PEES ATTY), but I think the theme is interesting enough that you're not really going to notice that stuff very much. Plus, you get DOGGO. Hard to notice any bad stuff when there's a DOGGO around.

[Tired and bored]

My only criticism of the grid involves, not surprisingly, a bad crossing. Well, bad for me, for sure. Crossing two foreign words at a vowel is always a dicey proposition unless they are both super well-known. I've never heard of PAYA. I'm guessing it's a NYTXW debut. Fantastic. New food word. Cool. But if you know it's a debut, and it's not exactly in the first tier of curry fame (in the U.S.), then Every Cross Must Be Unambiguous. And arguably, every cross is ... but not for me, who is one of the probably largish handful of people who both hadn't heard of PAYA *and* misspelled the exclamation AY CARAMBA! as AY CARUMBA! (it's a super-common misspelling—there's even some official-looking "Simpsons" merch with that spelling on it). Since CARAMBA is only an exclamation (a "minced oath for carajo [penis]" (wikipedia), etymology was no help to me. I had only Bart Simpson's voice to go on, and he says it more like "-umba" than "-amba." This is an error on my part that I'd normally pick up from the cross. Only today, the cross was PAYA. Which came out PUYA. Which really looked just fine to me. The end. Until it wasn't the end. To my small credit, when I didn't get the "You've successfully finished the puzzle!" alert, I knew immediately where my error was. But that doesn't keep it from being an error. 

I don't really believe ECOSAVVY is a thing (15A: Quite green). Otherwise, the grid looks pretty nice. Briefly forgot what CELESTAS were, so that area took a little work (7D: Relatives of glockenspiels). Also briefly forgot what CONJunctions were (5D: If, and or but: Abbr.), and bizarrely wrote in CONT. (for "contraction" ???) at first. And since I wasn't sure if it was ABSOLOM or ABSALOM (6D: Biblical name repeated in a Faulkner title), I got in some real trouble at 21A: Tired and bored (JADED) until I eventually just sang the Schoolhouse Rock song to myself ("'and' 'but' and 'or' get you pretty far! ... CONJunction Junction, what's your function?"). And there was the "J." And there was JADED. I am at my happiest in the very early morning, but it is clear that I am not at my ... let's say, sharpest. Take care!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]