Assisted pregnancy procedure, for short / TUE 11-12-24 / Virtual animal companion / Internet deep dive, metaphorically / Vocal skeptics / Father ___, personification of New York City in old cartoons / Fast-food chain that has a long-running feud with Jon Stewart / Threaded fastener

Constructor: Avery Gee Katz and Aaron Gee

Relative difficulty: Tough for a Tuesday

THEME: The HORSE'S MOUTH (56A: From which to hear the real story, as suggested by the starts of 20-, 26- and 51-Across) — theme answers begin with homophones for horse sounds:

Theme answers:

• KNICKERBOCKER ("nicker") (20A: Father ___, personification of New York City in old cartoons)
• NAYSAYERS ("neigh") (26A: Vocal skeptics)
• WINNIE-THE-POOH ("whinny") (51A: Bear who sings "I'm so rumbly in my tumbly")

Word of the Day: LEGIONARY (4D: Roman soldier) —

The Roman legionary (in Latin legionarius; pl.: legionarii) was a citizen soldier of the Roman army. These soldiers would conquer and defend the territories of ancient Rome during the late Republic and Principate eras, alongside auxiliary and cavalry detachments. At its height, Roman legionaries were viewed as the foremost fighting force in the Roman world, with commentators such as Vegetius praising their fighting effectiveness centuries after the classical Roman legionary disappeared.

Roman legionaries were recruited from Roman citizens under age 45. They were first predominantly made up of recruits from Roman Italy, but more were recruited from the provinces as time went on. As legionaries moved into newly conquered provinces, they helped Romanize the native population and helped integrate the disparate regions of the Roman Empire into one polity. They enlisted in a legion for 25 years of service, a change from the early practice of enlisting only for a campaign. Legionaries were expected to fight, but they also built much of the infrastructure of the Roman Empire and served as a policing force in the provinces. They built large public works projects, such as walls, bridges, and roads. The legionary's last five years of service were on lighter duties. Once retired, a Roman legionary received a parcel of land or its equivalent in money and often became a politically prominent member of society. (wikipedia)

Secondary Word of the Day: 

legionnaire (n.): 

1. a member of a legion, in particular an ancient Roman legion or the French Foreign Legion. (Oxford Languages / google)

1. 
   

• • •

What does the horse say? Well, "neigh," obviously. If you're speaking English and not Horse, then a horse might "whinny." I did not know that a horse could "nicker." If I've seen this word (and I'm sure I have, somewhere, sometime...) it's probably in books about pre-industrial life. A book from Horse Times. But I could've sat here and listed every horse-sound term I know and never gotten to "nicker" (in fact, never gotten past "whinny"). This made no real difference in terms of solving difficulty, since I didn't know horses were involved at all until near the very end, and you didn't have to know horses sounds or have any specific horseology expertise to solve the themers. But it wasn't just the lesser-known horse sound that made KNICKERBOCKER strange to me; I'd also never heard of Father KNICKERBOCKER, and since I hadn't heard of him, I couldn't possibly know that he was the "personification of New York City in old cartoons." I know KNICKERBOCKER as a general (and old-fashioned) term for someone from New York, as well as (obviously) the formal name of anyone playing on the New York basketball team, the New York Knicks. "Knicks" is short for KNICKERBOCKER that I knew. Not a hard answer to infer with a few crosses, but still, kind of tough trivia for a Tuesday. Another thing I didn't know: LEGIONARY. I know "Legionnaire," which is a ... conventioneer of some kind, as well as a famous disease. But when "Legionnaire" wouldn't fit today, I had to wait for crosses to help me get the ending. This is only the second time LEGIONARY has appeared in the NYTXW (the other time was in 2015). The 1-2 punch of KNICKERBOCKER-LEGIONARY alone put this puzzle into somewhat harder territory than the average Tuesday for me. Not uncomfortably so. But so.

The theme idea is simple and cute. I'm weirdly missing the "the" in the phrase "the HORSE'S MOUTH," though. Feels like the revealer clue should at least have "With 'The'" as a qualifier. You'd never hear HORSE'S MOUTH used in this idiomatic, non-veterinary sense without the "The." Otherwise, the theme is solid. Just fine. It's an oversized puzzle (16 rows tall), so if it played a little slower for you today, that's one possible reason why. It definitely played slower for me, but size had nothing to do with it. In addition to the now-legendary LEGIONARY-KNICKERBOCKER debacle, there were other obstacles lying in wait for me today. Not one but two minor TV actors made me stop short and look to the crosses for help. I've at least heard of CHAD Michael Murray—sort of, vaguely (21D: Actor ___ Michael Murray of "One Tree Hill") (side note: why is "Actor" in this clue??). One Tree Hill makes me laugh because that's not just bygone TV, that's bygone network. It started on The WB, which later merged with UPN to form THE CW, which has somehow appeared in the NYTXW only twice despite being a novel and potentially hard-to-parse 5-letter answer THECW (pronounced 'THECK-wuh') (jk). One Tree Hill ran nine seasons!? (2003-12). Wow, the early '00s really are a cultural black hole for me. I actually watched Glee for a time (the first few seasons), but did not know the actors' names beyond crossword-famous LEA Michele (my apologies to NAYA Rivera) (35D: "Glee" actress Rivera). So, I didn't know the actor from the show I did watch, and I did know (kinda sorta) the actor from the show I didn't. Strange. Anyway, the point is that relatively obscure pop culture trivia added another element of slowness today. 


There were other small trouble spots. I had no idea what "Completion document" even meant. Just a completely inscrutable phrase to me. And I didn't just need to know what it was, I needed to know its abbrev.? Didn't happen without lots of help from crosses (CERT. = "certificate," I imagine, i.e. a document you might receive upon completing ... something). And then EASE really wanted to be EASY (25A: Smooth sailing, so to speak), which left me with a bygone African country name that I seemed never to have heard of. Me: "... DAIRY? FAIRY? ... ZAIRY!? Oh, right, ZAIRE" (12D: Former name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The rest of the puzzle was reasonably smooth sailing (see!), though the clue [Assisted pregnancy procedure, for short] had me thinking of a procedure performed literally at birth, perhaps by a doula or midwife or something, and I was like "ok, what abbr. am I going to not have heard of today!?" But the "procedure" was from way earlier in the pregnancy—it's just IVF, i.e. in vitro fertilization.

NEOPET in the singular seems less than ideal (see yesterday's DORITO / TIDE POD discussion), and again, as with the TV clues, it feels bygone. Having EELY and EGGY in the same grid feels somehow unappetizing, though unatama don (grilled eel with eggs on rice) does sound kind of good. EELY just has a slime factor, as a word. DCAREA also has a slime factor, in that it's arbitrary and bad. It's about as valid as [any city + AREA]. The only metropolitan "___ AREA" that really lands is BAY AREA. You can't have DCAREA and not, say, LAAREA, and you see how dumb that looks (I'm staring at it DUMBLY right now). LAAREA has never appeared in the NYTXW, and yet I somehow like it even better than DCAREA (perhaps because I once lived in the greater LAAREA. DCAREA's one virtue is that it's better than INDC, a four-letter abomination that you see from time to time (LA wins here once again: at least with INLA, you can make it into a plausible partial).

Loved RABBIT HOLE (31D: Internet deep dive, metaphorically) and (to a lesser extent) JACKASSES (10D: Bozos). I also loved how I stupidly parsed "IT'S NOTHING" as "IT's NO [space] THING" and thought "What? Who says that?" I could imagine "AIN'T NO THING" (which is a Toby Keith song as well as an Outkast song (?!)), but "IT'S NO THING" seemed weird. Because it was. Because it wasn't the answer. The answer was "IT'S NOTHING" (33D: "Not a big deal!").  At least I didn't read it as "It's not hing," I guess. That would've been worse. "'HING!?' What's a HING!?" It's nothing. 

["It ain't no big thing..."]

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]