Sound unit found in many Asian languages / SUN 3-31-24 / Final phase of a video game, perhaps / Toy brand for a budding engineer, maybe / With "the," a sudden flip from attraction to disgust, in modern parlance / Its water is nearly 10 times saltier than ocean water / Police captain in "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" / Sibilant summons

Constructor: Spencer Leach

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Turns of Phrase" — familiar phrases (following a "___ THE ___" pattern) have their first and last parts switched *and* (most of the time?) changed to homophones, creating ... yes, wackiness:

Theme answers:

• ALARM THE RAYS (22A: Spook some creatures in an aquarium's tank?)
• DAZE THE COUNT (33A: Deliver a blow to Dracula?)
• CITES THE SEE (47A: References a Vatican Library source?)
• SCREWS THE TITANS (60A: Referees a Tennessee football game poorly?)
• HONOR THE DEW (79A: Write an ode to a caffeinated soda?)
• HEAT THE BEETS (90A: Start preparing borscht?)
• PRESS THE MEAT (104A: Make smash burgers?)

Word of the Day: TONEME (84A: Sound unit found in many Asian languages) —

A phoneme in a language that uses different tones for different meanings. (wiktionary) //  [PHONEME: "any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat." (google / Oxford languages)]

• • •

For a puzzle that seems to want desperately for you to see it as youthful (the Taylor Swift lyrics and the YEETing and whatever that clue on ICK is, etc.), the theme is remarkably basic and corny and last-century. The puns are sometimes funny, sometimes not, mostly ho-hum, definitely old-fashioned. It's not showing anything terribly inventive or interesting, and if you look too hard at the theme, it starts to unravel a bit. I mean, you have to understand the parameters very loosely. It's really just a sound change thing. Sometimes the spellings of words change, sometimes they don't, sometimes the meanings change drastically, sometimes you just change a noun into its related verb (i.e HEAT into HEAT). You always change the spelling of the last word (except with SEE ... and COUNT ... where just the meanings are changed), but you never change the spelling of the first word (except with DAZE ... and CITES ...). It all works best if you don't really look at the grid, but just *say* the new ("turned") phrase: "raise the alarm" => "ALARM THE RAYS." Perfect. Textbook wackiness of the aural kind. Taken at that level, the themers all work ... except HONOR THE DEW—the phrase is not "do the honor," but "do the honors," plural. You might "do someone the honor of" something, but as a standalone phrase (which is what we're doing here), it's "do the honors." HONORS THE DEW would've worked perfectly ... but it's HONOR THE DEW because that's what fit in the allotted grid space. Symmetry is a harsh mistress, it's true, but if the *correct* version of your themer doesn't fit, it doesn't fit, and you should find something else. Of course the grid could've been built with CITES THE SEES (plural) and HONORS THE DEW as a symmetrical pair. But it wasn't. If this puzzle were full of wonder and delight and genuine humor, I wouldn't be noticing this relatively trivial defect. But the theme is just OK, so I notice. Greatness excuses unevenness. Without greatness, though ... leeway retracted.

"THE ARCHER" peaked at #38, but I guess charts don't matter anymore, we're all just supposed to know the whole Swift catalogue by heart (6D: Taylor Swift song that begins "Combat. I'm ready for combat"). God bless her and her fans, but come on. I mean, she's a Sagittarius, awesome, me too, but ... at least give me a clue that has *something* to do with bows and arrows. "Combat. I'm ready for combat" only suggests bows and arrows if you're living in medieval times. I wanted "THE something something WAR" or "THE ARMOUR" (British sp.??). Had to get through CLOROX, with its awful pandemic profiteering clue, to finally figure out "THE ARCHER." Other things about which I had no or little clue: BETTA (I had TETRA) (LOL if BETTA is "common" why is it debuting in the NYTXW only *today*?); and TONEME, yeeeeeesh, that one, crossing KNEX (not LEGO) (74D: Toy brand for a budding engineer, maybe), was rufffff. The very last letter I put in the grid was that "E." TONEME, also a debut. I'm not sure "congratulations" are really in order for either of these debuts. THNEEDVILLE (also a debut) at least has the virtue of being huge and bold. I never read "The Lorax" as a child (I learned to read from the Dr. Seuss dictionary, but my Dr. Seuss story education didn't go any farther than "One Fish, Two Fish" and "Green Eggs and Ham" (absolute staples)). Still, I must've picked up enough "Lorax" lore over the years that eventually THNEEDVILLE came to me. A big goofy answer that has broad demographic appeal—that's something I can get behind. 

Hard stuff (for me) included ARSE ([Git] really reads like a countrified "Get out of here, animal or child or other nuisance!"—as opposed to what it is here: British for "foolish or worthless person") and AULI'I Cravalho (commit that name to memory because she is young and full of vowels and she is working, most recently in the 2024 remake of Mean Girls). Weak stuff included HBO SHOW (just... "show?") and "IT'S A ZOO" (really wants an "in there" or "out there" to be fully viable) (10D: Comment from someone exiting the mall on Black Friday). Clue on TOOK was tortured (113A: Jumped over, as a checkers piece)—"as a ___" implies that it's just one example, but "Jumped over" is *the only* example for this meaning of TOOK, so the clue is kind of lying to you. The long Downs in the NE and SW are quite good, and "HELL YEAH!" is welcome whenever wherever. Great energy. "HANG IN THERE" and "NO ME GUSTA," also praiseworthy. And I enjoy both PISSARRO and HOT DATES, so the grid is not without its pleasures, for sure. Most of these pleasures were non-thematic, though, which is kind of an issue on a Sunday, when there's just So Much Theme.

Speaking of pleasures, here are my Puzzles of the Month for March 2024 (two themed, one themeless):

March 2024 Puzzles of the Month:

Themed: 

• Christina Iverson, "THREE-HOLE PUNCH" (Tuesday, Mar. 5, 2004) 
• Laura Dershewitz and Katherine Baicker, "AD HOMINEM" (Tuesday, Mar. 26, 2004) 

Themeless: 

• Carly Schuna (SHOOT YOUR SHOT, DEEP FAKE, ADOPT DON'T SHOP, BRIOCHE BUN) (Saturday, Mar. 16, 2024)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]