Big name in Greek yogurt / WED 8-14-24 / Texting format, in brief / One making a bed, perhaps / Leakes of reality TV / Beatles hit written by a teenage Paul McCartney / Insistently unhip

Constructor: Samuel A. Donaldson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "YOUR ROOTS ARE SHOWING" (48A: With 56-Across, hairstylist's observation (that also applies to 17-, 25- and 34-Across?)) — numbers are replaced with their (square) roots in three answers:

Theme answers:

• CLOUD THREE (from "cloud nine") (17A: Seventh heaven)
• SWEET FOUR (from "Sweet Sixteen") (25A: March Madness round)
• "WHEN I'M EIGHT" (from "When I'm Sixty-Four") (34A: Beatles hit written by a teenage Paul McCartney)

Word of the Day: Tegan and Sara (12D: Tegan and Sara, e.g. = POP DUO) —

Tegan and Sara (/ˈtiːɡən, ˈsɛərə/) is a Canadian indie pop duo formed in 1998 in Calgary, Alberta. The band is led by identical twin sisters, Tegan Rain Quin and Sara Keirsten Quin(born September 19, 1980). Both musicians are songwriters and multi-instrumentalists.

The duo has released ten studio albums and earned a Grammy nomination in 2012 for their video album Get Along. Their most recent album, Crybaby, was released on October 21, 2022. Their memoir, High School, was released on September 24, 2019, and in the fall of 2022, the TV series based on the memoir was released on Amazon Freevee.

• • •

[My CSA]

Do hairstylists really say this to their clients? Seems blunt. Maybe too blunt. "YOUR ROOTS ARE SHOWING" sounds like something you'd say to someone you're trying to casually insult (for being old, or phony, or not keeping up appearances), a phrase possibly followed by "dearie" or preceded by "honey." But then it could just be a benign observation from your hairstylist. I don't know. I don't have hair, and I never colored it when I did have it, so this is slightly foreign territory to me, but I'm familiar with the concept of roots showing, and I like what this puzzle has done with the idea. The basic idea of the theme becomes evident right away, or early anyway. I got CLOUD, and then NINE wouldn't fit in the five remaining spaces, so I had to work crosses to see what sort of NINE substitute was supposed to go there. Had a little trouble getting into that THREE—first two short crosses I tried to work were misfires (GAGS and HAH instead of SETS and HEH) (5D: Comedians' collections + 6D: "Good one")—but after some hacking, the THREE showed up and, yeah, THREE is the square "root" of NINE, as you probably know. Once the square root idea was clear, the other two themers weren't hard at all, but they were kinda fun to discover. The only question was "why are we doing this?" (i.e. "what is the revealer payoff going to be?"), and it only took a few letters in the first part of the revealer for the whole thing to become clear. That's a lot of real estate to give over to a revealer when you've only got three actual theme answers (no examples of the theme at all below the grid equator!), but when your revealer's fresh and sassy, maybe it deserves to take over half the grid. And if that revealer was too easy to get, well, it's Wednesday, not Thursday, so no one's really asking for excessive difficulty here. For me, the cuteness levels were sufficient, none of themers were duds—I'm happy.

The fill was more hit/miss. Those banks of 6s and 7s in the corners are a showcase for some more-interesting-than-usual fill (I'm particularly fond of the GETWET TAILPIPE MATINEE SNAGGED grouping in the SE), but there's a bit of clanking in the short stuff. I will never not find SPOOR unappealing as a word, and in the plural, moreso, especially if you cross it with ODO- (one of your less appealing prefixes ... and prefixes are rarely if ever appealing). I managed to remember OIKOS, and it's fine, I guess, but ODO OIKOS SPOORS just gives off a kind of ... ODOR (59A: Gym bag emanation). OIKOS ODOR ODO ODE HOER ... say that a few times, that'll wake you up. Or ERR EERIE EPEE ERAS, that's fun too. You can take back your SMS and your AMS and your ACTI, your DEE and your DEO, your SNO and SLO. It's all a bit LIMP. I love PHO but I'm not sure I love PHOS, which makes its NYTXW debut here as a soup plural—there are a few earlier (much earlier) appearances of PHOS in the puzzle, but those are all clued [Light: Pref.], except for that one time in 1988 when Maleska clued it as [Old cries of contempt], oof. Thank god *that* clue never reappeared. I would definitely have said "Pho!" to that. Possibly multiple times. So many "PHO!"S would I have uttered!

Notes:

• 21A: Texting format, in brief (SMS) — one of those abbrs. that I know but always slightly misremember. Is it RSS? MSS? HMS? LDS? ... SMH. 
• 35D: One making a bed (HOER) — ah, HOERs in beds, that doesn't sound weird or double entendre-y at all! Did you know that HOER is, in fact, Dutch (and Afrikaans) for "whore"? True story.
• 39A: Major league? (ARMY) — I got this easily enough, but it took me a while to fully understand it. My mind just processed "Major league" as just a large group (a metaphorical ARMY) of something. Only later did I realize, "oh, 'Major' is a rank ... in the ARMY ... so the ARMY is the 'league' that the Major ... plays in?" Something like that. 
• 47A: Composer ___ Carlo Menotti (GIAN) — I'm used to thinking of "Giancarlo" as one name (to the extent that I think about the name at all, which, admittedly, is only when I happen to be thinking about Giancarlo Esposito). Menotti composed the opera "AMAHL and the Night Visitors," which I have never seen and only know about because of crosswords. Definitely keep an eye out for AMAHL if you've not seen him before (70 NYTXW appearances, 33 in the Modern Era). The opera made its debut on NBC in 1951 ("the first opera specifically composed for television in the United States") and first appeared in the NYTXW in 1953. Let it not be said that Margaret Farrar* was averse to pop culture! A two-year turnaround time, that's not bad. 

• 53A: Wilbur, to Fern, in "Charlotte's Web" (PET PIG) — had that first "P" and wrote in PIGLET. Because Wilbur is a PIGLET. Very unfortunate misstep.
• 22D: Insistently unhip (STODGY) — I prefer to think of myself as "delightfully old-fashioned," but if you must namecall... I mainly hear this word now in baking contexts, specifically in the voice of Paul Hollywood or Mary Berry:

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*Margaret Farrar was the first editor of the NYTXW

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