What "E" stands for in golf / MON 2-5-24 / Surreptitiously give, as classified information / Legally prohibit / What quill pens are dipped in / Dipstick coating

Constructor: Desirée Penner and Jeff Sinnock

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: FIGHTING WORDS (37A: "Wanna take this outside?," e.g. ... or what are found four times in this puzzle's circled letters) — comic-book fighting sounds are embedded inside four answers:

Theme answers:

• SCUBA MASKS (18A: Underwater divers' aids)
• PIZZA PIE (23A: "When the moon hits your eye like a big ___, that's amore" (Dean Martin lyric))
• RUB OFF ON (55A: Influence through close contact)
• "POLKA POWER" (61A: Weird Al Yankovic medley that features "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls)

[I gave a talk on early mass-market paperback cover art at this conference in 2010]

Word of the Day: "Ta-RA-RA Boom-de-ay" (15D: "Ta-___ Boom-de-ay") —

"Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" is a vaudeville and music hall song first performed by the 1880s. It was included in Henry J. Sayers' 1891 revue Tuxedo in Boston, Massachusetts. The song became widely known in the 1892 version sung by Lottie Collins in London music halls, and also became popular in France. 

The melody was later used in various contexts, including as the theme song to the mid-20th century United States television show Howdy Doody. 

The song's authorship was disputed for some years. It was originally credited to Henry J. Sayers, the manager of Rich and Harris, a producer of the George Thatcher Minstrels. Sayers used the song in the troupe's 1891 production Tuxedo, a minstrel farce variety show, in which "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" was sung by Mamie Gilroy. Sayers later said that he had not written the song, but heard it performed in the 1880s by a black singer, Mama Lou, in a well-known St. Louis brothel run by "Babe" Connors. Another American singer, Flora Moore, said that she had sung the song in the early 1880s. [...] From 1974 to 1988 the Disneyland park in Anaheim, California, included a portion of the song in their musical revue attraction America Sings, in the finale of Act 3 – The Gay 90s. (wikipedia)

• • •

Extremely easy Downs-only solve. The theme seems fine except for two things. First, that Weird Al "medley" seems *pretty* obscure. Not exactly Monday theme answer material. The puzzle is so easy overall that the obscurity hardly matters, but still, you can feel the stretch there. The bigger problem, thematically, is RUB OFF ON. The lesser problem is that "ON" doesn't touch the embedded word, and the perfectly executed, perfectly elegant version of this theme type, embedded words touch all words in the base phrase. But like I say, that's a lesser problem. The bigger problem is BOFF, which ... I think maybe you're thinking of BIFF! Because "BIFF!" is definitely a noted comic book sound, if a lesser one. Lots of examples if you Google Image Search BIFF! Whereas BOFF ... well, it doesn't google as well as a comic-book sound effect meaning. In fact, BOFF has a different meaning, where I come from. A more ... frankly ... sexual meaning. And apparently not just where I come from. I mean, just google [define boff] and ...

You can BOP someone on the head, and that's kinda violent, but BOFF just doesn't register as a comic-book "fighting word" the way the others do. Feels like a huge swing and a miss. A fundamental flaw in the execution of the theme. So the core concept works fine, but BOFF mars the execution pretty bad.

As for the Downs-only solve, this was very much on the easy side. The only answer I really struggled with was the longer answer sitting dead center: 24D: What "E" stands for in golf (EVEN PAR). But when I say "struggled" I mean I couldn't get it from just the "E," but once I got the "N" from FIGHTING WORDS, and then mentally inserted the "V" at C_S, I guessed EVEN PAR, and was correct. I had a little bit of hesitation around the "I CAN SO" / DESTINED pair in the NE (8D: "You underestimate me!" / 9D: Governed by fate), but after getting ELK (10D: Rocky Mountain ___ (state animal of Utah)) and ALS (11D: Politicians Gore and Franken), I had --EA for 8A, so I just hypothesized IDEA as the answer there, and then from D-S- got DESTINED, and then shortly thereafter got "I CAN SO" (those short colloquial phrases that are clued as quotations are often hard to get a grip on without help from crosses). Oh, and I hesitated on the last two letters of RA-RA, fearing it would be something dumb like RA-LA or RA-TA or whatever. RA-RA is terrible fill. It's bad as Latin for "rare" (see "RARA avis," as it is often clued), and even worse as this olde-tymey song title fragment. ESTOP isn't winning any awards either (1D: Legally prohibit). The fill was mostly middling overall, but only RA-RA is likely to make anyone blink and think ra-really?

That's Monday, then. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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