What gives Scotch an earthy flavor / MON 2-12-24 / Undergarment for a dress / Menial workers, dismissively / Baked things that might get people baked / Long, cylindrical instrument

Constructor: Jess Shulman and Amie Walker

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (solved Downs-only, untimed)

THEME: [Get my innuendo?] — this clue is used for four repeated-word phrases that you might use when you want to make sure your meaning is being understood 

Theme answers:

• NUDGE NUDGE
• WINK WINK
• HINT HINT
• COUGH COUGH

Word of the Day: Midori ITO (58A: Midori ___, first woman to land a triple axel in competition) —

 

Midori Ito (伊藤みどり, Itō Midori, born 13 August 1969) is a retired Japanese figure skater. She is the 1989 World champion and the 1992 Olympic silver medalist. She is the first woman to land a triple-triple jump combination and a triple Axel in competition. At the 1988 Calgary Olympics, she became the first woman to land seven triple jumps in an Olympic free skating competition. She is widely recognised as one of the best figure skaters of all time. (wikipedia) 

• • •

An excellent Monday theme, I think. It's a bit weird, and maybe even a little shaggy, in that the first two phrases are usually said rather than done (i.e. if you actually winked twice, people would wonder what you were doing ... awkwardly flirting, maybe?). So they are stated actions ... but then HINT HINT ... is not that. The word "HINT" isn't standing in for "hint," it's literally just saying "HINT." And then COUGH COUGH ... well, that's another category of answer entirely. Unlike NUDGE NUDGE and WINK WINK, COUGH COUGH is a phrase I've never actually heard anyone say. That's an action that's done rather than said. So this group of four really isn't that tight ... except that they are all repeated-word phrases and they all mean or represent basically the same thing. Somehow it works. You understand intuitively what links them all, and they're structurally linked by their double-wordness, so you're only gonna balk at this theme if you think about it too hard, which is pretty much what I do about every theme, but today ... I dunno. The grouping seemed clever. Simple. Imaginative. Good. And the grid didn't give me hives. No great shakes, but POT BROWNIES and BEAT THE HEAT are definitely above-average long Downs, and if the rest of the fill is average, that's fine. Good theme, good long Downs, OK fill ... that's a win.

If the green ink on my printed-out puzzle is any indication, it looks like there were three Downs that gave me trouble today during the Downs-only solve, and one Across that I had significant trouble parsing. As for the Downs, ORDOC was probably the hardest to get on its own terms. That is, I couldn't hope to understand it from the clue alone (46D: Surgeon, for short), so I had to wait on (inferred) crosses, but I couldn't infer any of those with certainty until I had COUGH COUGH in place. That gave me the terminal "C" which finally got me to ORDOC. I had a reasonable amount of trouble coming up with ENSHROUD as well (41D: Cover completely). Even with the -OUD in place, I had to sit and think for a bit. Didn't help that I had SWALE (!?!?!?!) instead of SWATH at 30D: Strip of mowed grass. What the hell is a SWALE? Marshland of some kind? Ah, a "sunken or marshy place," yes. Anyway, grass is involved, so I don't feel *so* bad, but neither do I feel great. Actually, knowing the theme really helped here, as I was able to infer HINT HINT from -IN--IN- (once I finally pulled out SWALE), and that got me the "H" I needed to get PATHS (ambiguous noun-or-verb clue on that one, 26D: Trails), and from there I could get other Acrosses in that area, which finally allowed me to bring down BEAT THE HEAT, the last of the three recalcitrant Downs in today's solve (24D: Keep cool in a pool, perhaps). "SO I HEAR" was the one Across answer that was (slight) murder to parse (55A: "That's what people tell me, anyway") (had the SOI- but at that point had no way to know there was a break between "SO" and "I"). Anyway, all of this amounted to a fairly standard Downs-only struggle. Never was I well and truly stuck.

The only Down I really balked at was the very first one I saw: 1D: Chicken leftover (BONE). I wrote in BONE, but I did so very, very tentatively, as "leftover" is (in one common meaning of the word) something you eat, whereas a BONE is something you deliberately do not eat; it's something you discard. So my brain wanted the edible rather than the inedible kind of "leftover," hence the balking. But there's nothing wrong with the clue. It just threw me a bit. Nearly everything else, and certainly everything else under eight letters (besides ORDOC and (for me) SWATH) was very easy to get. Simple, bouncy, good. A fine Monday.

I'm going out-of-state this week, so my wonderful substitute team will be on duty here until Saturday. Starting tomorrow, you get Clare (T), Mali (W), Eli (Th), Mali (F). And then I'm back. Have a great week. See you when I see you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]