Compartmented Japanese lunch / MON 3-28-22 / Classification for the barely famous / Himalayan country that's home to the world's highest unclimbed mountain / Bluish gray hue

Constructor: Leslie Rogers

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (maybe the coded theme clues make it slightly harder than a typical Monday theme, but the rest of it felt easier than typical, actually)

THEME: take the punctuation (and symbols) literally — clues for theme answers are two-word phrases where the second word is clued normally but the first word is clued symbolically. So

Theme answers:

• 16A: Q.U.E.U.E.S. = a word meaning LINES that has been DOTTED, thus DOTTED LINES
• 27A: E+X+T+R+A+S = a word meaning BONUSES that has had "+" signs added to it, so I guess it's been "ADDED" (?), thus ADDED BONUSES
• 44A: W/H/E/E/L/S = a word meaning TIRES that has been SLASHED, thus SLASHED TIRES
• 58A: D-R-E-A-M-S = a word meaning HOPES that has been "DASHED", thus DASHED HOPES

Word of the Day: BHUTAN (42A: Himalayan country that's home to the world's highest unclimbed mountain) —

Bhutan (/buːˈtɑːn/; Dzongkha: འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, romanized: Druk Yul [ʈuk̚˩.yː˩]), officially known as the Kingdom of Bhutan (Dzongkha: འབྲུག་རྒྱལ་ཁབ་, romanized: Druk Gyal Khap), is a landlocked country in the Eastern Himalayas, located between China and India. Bhutan is known as "Druk Yul," or "Land of the Thunder Dragon". Nepal and Bangladesh are located near Bhutan but do not share a land border. The country has a population of over 754,000 and territory of 38,394 square kilometers (14,824 sq mi) which ranks 133rd in terms of land area and 160th in population. Bhutan is a constitutional monarchy with Vajrayana Buddhism as the state religion.

The subalpine Himalayan mountains in the north rise from the country's lush subtropical plains in the south. In the Bhutanese Himalayas, there are peaks higher than 7,000 meters (23,000 ft) above sea level. Gangkhar Puensum is Bhutan's highest peak and was until recently the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. The wildlife of Bhutan is notable for its diversity, including the Himalayan takin. The capital and largest city is Thimphu. (wikipedia)

• • •

This theme is very cute, although if you are forced to describe it concisely, you realized ... it's not so easy. Also, you realize that among the four themers, ADDED BONUSES is a real outlier. Add a dot, it's dotted; add a dash, it's dashed; add a slash, it's slashed; add a ... a ... plus sign? ... it's added. There's something so on-the-nose about dots and dashes and slashes, and thus so off about the "added" answer. You also can't say the clue word has been "added"—its letters appear to be "added" together, yes, but ... well, I guess you can say the letters in EXTRAS have been added ... I dunno. It just doesn't land like the others, even though the concept felt pretty transparent to me as I was solving. What bothered me about ADDED BONUSES had nothing to do with the theme concept and everything to do with the horridness of the phrase itself. Bonuses are, by definition, added, so ADDED BONUSES has an inherent redundancy that makes me wince as one might wince were one to hear fingernails scraped across a board of chalk (ask your parents). So ADDED BONUSES (ironically) had nothing to offer, but I still really like the core concept here. You don't usually see this kind of conceptual complexity in a Monday theme. And yet it still managed to be Monday-easy. Maybe more-than-Monday-easy. I see people already bragging like crazy on Twitter about their new Monday PRs (personal records). So, despite my balking at nearly everything about ADDED BONUSES, I found this one delightful and perfectly Monday-appropriate. 

The grid is also mercifully clean and surprisingly colorful. Big thumbs up for BENTO BOX and SAD TO SAY ... I really want CUSS WORD to be CURSE WORD, so I'm not loving that one as much as maybe I should, but it's at least trying to be interesting. I redid the whole middle of the grid just so I wouldn't have to look at DLIST, which is an answer I don't like and a concept I don't really believe in (what happened to the CLIST? Where is it? No one talks about this!?). But my grid redo was mostly a lateral move, so without digging in for longer than I care to, I can't fault this DLIST version of the grid too much. 

Can we talk for a second about "as" in crossword clues. When "as" follows a comma in a clue, it's most often introducing a qualifying phrase, and seems to be offering an example of an appropriate context for the pre-comma part of the clue—often an appropriate object for a verb. [Inflate, as a tire] could be PUMP UP, say. But in that case, it's at least possible to imagine that other things might also be "pumped up"—an ego, say. The "tire" is offered as a helpful, narrowing example, but not the only example. Cut to—22A: Share, as a Twitter post (RETWEET). There is literally no, none, zero other context in which "Share" = RETWEET. The "as" has a "for example" quality that is belied by the answer. There is only one context where [Share] = RETWEET—on Twitter. [Share on Twitter] is an honest clue. [Share, as a Twitter post] implies there is *any* other context in which [Share] can mean RETWEET. But there is no such context. Why does this bug me when there's no difficulty in getting the answer? I Don't Know, It Just Does. I hate the phoniness of the clue, kind of casually implying that "as a Twitter post" is just an offhand example when in fact it is the *only* example. Seems disingenuous and mildly fraudulent. Also, do you really think St. Nick calls his clothes a SANTA SUIT!? They're probably just ... clothes, to him. "OK, elves, Rudolph, just hang on, I gotta go get my Me Suit from the cleaners," what the hell? [Costume for a mall St. Nick], yes. But for St. Nick himself ... I just don't think that's what he'd call it. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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