1980s skating great Thomas / MON 4-28-25 / Round Mongolian dwelling / Versatile yet unspecialized sort / Cuban cocktails garnished with mint leaves / Often-spotty service on a train / Funnyman Rogen / Marcus who co-founded MGM

Constructor: Sue Fracker

Relative difficulty: Easy (Easy-Medium for me, solving Downs-only)

THEME: MULTI-HYPHENATES (58A: Ones with many talents ... and a hint to 17-, 24-, 35- and 51-Across) — literal description of four theme answers:

Theme answers:

• JACK-OF-ALL-TRADES (17A: Versatile yet unspecialized sort)
• FIVE-YEAR-OLD (24A: Typical kindergartener)
• KNOW-IT-ALL (35A: Smarty-pants)
• MOTHER-IN-LAW (51A: The Bible's Naomi vis-à-vis Ruth)

Word of the Day: DEBI Thomas (48D: 1980s skating great Thomas) —

Debra Janine Thomas (born March 25, 1967) is an American figure skater and physician. She is the 1986 World champion, the 1988 Olympic bronze medalist, and a two-time U.S. national champion. Her rivalry with East Germany's Katarina Witt at the 1988 Calgary Olympics was known as the Battle of the Carmens. (wikipedia)

• • •

This write-up will be short (I swear!), not because I'm pressed for time, but because I just don't have much to say. I don't really understand how this concept passed muster. There are so many multi-hyphenate phrases in the world—why are we doing these, exactly? The themer set is so incredibly arbitrary, so apparently random. FIVE-YEAR-OLD? Why not four- or three-? No reason. MOTHER-IN-LAW? Why not father- or sister-? No reason. Why not WILL-O-THE-WISP or STICK-IN-THE-MUD or SO-AND-SO or GOOD-FOR-NOTHING or NE'ER-DO-WELL or on and on and on? I just cannot understand why this theme was deemed NYT-worthy. Feels like it was made thirty years ago, for a different publication with somewhat lower standards. Even the fill feels old. All the names are very familiar if you've been solving for decades. DEBI Thomas! That was a throwback (last seen in 2016, and before that, 2003). But SAAB and USAIR and PEPA and even OTERI all gave this one a decidedly ye-olden-days feel. You get a little pep in the corners (from stuff like EGO SURF ... and that bank of 7s in the SE corner is pretty nice), but overall this felt like the minor leagues—very passable, but not at all ready for the big time. Not in the year 2025, anyway. 

The Downs-only solve was super-easy up top. I ran the first five without hesitation:

From there, JACK-OF-ALL-TRADES came quickly (after JACK-O'-LANTERN—yet another multi-hyphenate!—wouldn't fit), which gave me letters for all the other Downs up top, and that really loosened the puzzle up for me. I didn't miss an answer, I don't think, until the bottom half of the grid, when all of a sudden I started to wobble. The worst obstacle, in retrospect, was probably NIPPY, a word I was convinced never to use many decades ago by a Japanese-American professor who had had people "jokingly" call the weather "NIPPY" within her earshot once too often (the first three letters are an ethnic slur for people of Japanese descent). It's a word that the NYTXW has not used now for twelve years, so for those reasons, it was not on my menu of possible answers for 53D: Like a brisk wind. I wrote in STIFF. Pfft. MULTI-HYPHENATES was always going to be tough to parse (solving Downs-only), but that error made it worse. And then I went and added a second error at 52D: Gave a big thumbs down, say (HATED). I put in BOOED ... and later, RATED. I should say that these errors made MOTHER-IN-LAW hard to parse as well. Throw in my having no idea what to do with 45D: "Count me in!" ("I'M THERE!")—even with the "I'M" in place—and the whole thing ends up a bit of a mess in the south. I got out of it, but it took some effort, unlike the top half of the grid, which took none.

A few more things:

• 1D: Cuban cocktails garnished with mint leaves (MOJITOS) — a nice way to open. It's a good word, and it always feels good to be able to drop a longer word in with no crosses. I knew right away it was correct, both because the cocktail is familiar to me, and because it put the "J" right where I would expect a "J" to go—at the front end of an answer, particularly a longer answer. Solve long enough and you get a pretty good feel not just for plausible / likely letter combinations, but for "Q"- and "Z"- and "J"-placement as well.  

• 44D: Bread box? (TOASTER) — first thought was "ATM ... something?" So it was funny to discover that this answer not only crossed ATM, but also had the same clue (nearly) as ATM (54A: Bread box, for short?). This is one of those times when the repeated-clue gimmick works perfectly. 
• 36D: The "O" of O.T.C. (OVER) — as in "OVER-the-counter" (more MULTI-HYPHENATES!)
• 25D: Round Mongolian dwelling (YURT) — while it shouldn't, this word always makes me laugh because there is a building on the Pitzer College campus that was called, familiarly, "The YURT"—at least that's what it was called when I was at Pomona in the early '90s. I don't know that it was an authentic YURT. More ... YURT-shaped, probably. Anyway, calling one of your buildings "The YURT" seemed like the most Pitzer College thing imaginable. Pitzer was the most free-spirit/crunchy-granola/discover-your-journey-type school of the five Claremont Colleges ... maybe it still is. Hard to know. All liberal arts colleges nowadays seem like they're incredibly hard to get into and full of the same highly aspirational and driven types (my sister, who was not at all a free-spirit/crunchy-granola/discover-your-journey type, graduated from Pitzer in 1994). Looks like Pitzer doesn't even have the YURT anymore, and hasn't for a long while. This Pitzer Facebook page is like "Did you know Pitzer once had a YURT!?" Yes. Yes I did. RIP, YURT.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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