Carefree motto, in modern lingo / MON 9-22-25 / Wine choice in southern France / Like speakeasies and refrigerators, at times / Word before food or mate / Low-scoring deadlock / Synthetic fabric once common on sweaters

Constructor: Dena R. Verkuil and Andrea Carla Michaels

Relative difficulty: Challenging (solved Downs-only)

THEME: "D'OH!" (71A: Cry from Homer ... or a phonetic hint to the ends of 18-, 27-, 48- and 62-Across) — names and phrases that end with a "D'OH" sound:

Theme answers:

• RED BORDEAUX (18A: Wine choice in southern France)
• JUSTIN TRUDEAU (27A: Canadian P.M. who is the son of another Canadian P.M.)
• SUPER NINTENDO (48A: Platform for Donkey Kong Country)
• COOKIE DOUGH (62A: Chunks found in Ben & Jerry's Half Baked ice cream)

Word of the Day: MARIO Puzo (67A: "The Godfather" author Puzo) —

Mario Francis Puzo (/ˈpuːzoʊ/; Italian: [ˈmaːrjo ˈputtso, -ddzo]; October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an American author and screenwriter. He wrote crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and for Part II in 1974. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film and its 1980 sequel. His final novel, The Family, was released posthumously in 2001. (wikipedia)

• • •

My daughter is GEN Z. Solidly GEN Z. She is twenty-five. In fact, she is exactly twenty-five, as today is her birthday. True story. Anyway, I'm telling you all this so you will understand why that GEN Z clue was a huge wince (1D: Kids these days). Maybe the very youngest members of GEN Z are still, technically, kids (i.e. under 18) but kids these days are definitely, solidly Generation Alpha. That is, *all* members of Generation Alpha are kids, but only a fraction of GEN Z are kids. If you are very old and still think "Millennials" are young people (they're middle-aged), and if you don't really know anyone GEN Z, I'm sure the "Kids these days" clue seemed cute and accurate. And I'll give you cute. But accurate it is not. Really surprised the editors didn't can that one. Also, on an extremely related note, YOLO is not "modern lingo" (36D: Carefree motto, in modern lingo). It is decidedly bygone. Like ... it started dying real soon after it became a thing in the early '10s (after Drake popularized it in the lyrics of "The Motto" (2011) and then The Lonely Island put out a "YOLO" song with Adam Levine and Kendrick Lamar (2012)). You can see actual lexicographers here talking about how that term died a hard and fast death. It fared poorly in the 2012 Word of the Year competition. Here's Ben Zimmer talking with Katherine Martin in Vanity Fair in early 2013:

__Zimmer:__I was always a fan of YOLO, even after the backlash hit, because for someone who watches the rise and fall of words, it kind of gave you a whole story of this very rapid development over the course of 2012 and its fall from grace, as well. When I wrote a column on it in August, I found out around that time that Katie Couric was starting her syndicated talk show and that she was going to have this regular feature, “What’s Your YOLO?” And when I heard that, I thought that’d have to be the death knell for YOLO.

__Martin:__We’re not convinced that it will necessarily stay with us in the long term. If you look at a Google Trends for searching, searches for YOLO peaked in April and then they began to plummet again, and they now seem to have evened out at a much lower level. By the time we were talking about the Word of the Year, we felt that YOLO was already passé. It was felt to be past its heyday; there was comment about there already being a backlash against it. Katie Couric was talking about YOLO.

Katie Couric, slang killer! Anyway, GEN Z were kids in 2012. YOLO was "modern slang" in 2012. It is not 2012 anymore. Lord, what I wouldn't give for 2012 right now, but ... nope, time opens all wounds and there is no going back.

Conceptually, I think this is a pretty cute theme. Hate the revealer though. It's flaccid. These revealers with no sass or zazz or pop, no wordplay, they depress me. Just "D'OH"? Not enough juice in that thing. But I like all the different "D'OH"-sounding endings. Very creative. Didn't love RED BORDEAUX as an answer. Felt like the kind of answer you use when you definitely need your theme answer to come out to 11 letters to make symmetry work. From a Downs-only perspective, parsing that one was rough, as was parsing JUSTIN TRUDEAU. If you don't know the theme and can't look at the Across clues, well then JUSTIN is likely to look the way it did to me: like two words. "JUST IN ... what, TIME? CASE?!" And TRUDEAU crosses were hard to come by. Had DAB ON (?) before RUB ON (30D: Apply, as ointment), and no idea about RAIDED or CODDLE or AREA MAP or TOUT at first pass (I had nothing for the first three, and HYPE for that last one). I was all the way down to the bottom of the grid before I got my first themer filled in (COOKIE DOUGH! Love Half Baked!) (the ice cream, not the movie—the movie remains the only movie I've ever walked out of). But COOKIE DOUGH didn't give me the theme. Only after getting SUPER NINTENDO, and then remembering that D'OH was at the bottom of the grid, did I have my own "D'OH!" moment and (finally) come back around to TRUDEAU and BORDEAUX.

The grid is a pangram—contains all the letters of the alphabet at least once. This used to be the kind of thing that constructors occasionally aspired to, but thankfully it fell out of favor as *trying* for the pangram often compromises basic fill quality. Also, no one cares about pangrams and most people don't notice. Still, I notice, and as pangrams go, this one doesn't feel too strained. To be clear, I think it's a non-achievement that no one should ever aspire to (just make the puzzle as good as you can!), but I don't think any real harm was done today. When your themer set already has the "X" "J" and "K" in it, you've only go got the "Z" and "Q" that are likely to give you any trouble, and the "Q" is pretty seamlessly handled today with SHAQ / QUACKED, so ... no foul. 

Bullets:

• 68A: Frequently, to a poet (OFT) — an old poet, or a pretentious poet, yes.
• 18A: Wine choice in southern France (RED BORDEAUX) — pretty sure you can make that "choice" anywhere in the world they serve wine? "Wine from southern France" makes more sense.
• 38A: Where canines sleep (DOG BEDS) — our dogs died in 2019 and 2020, respectively, but we kept their dog beds and one of them is definitely now a cat bed. It takes up way too much space on the floor, and we keep thinking we should do something different with that space, but then I come downstairs and see Alfie lounging in the middle of that giant pillow and I don't have the heart to get rid of it. So this raggedy-ass dog bed is just gonna sit on our living room floor until god knows when, I guess. 

[ignoring cat bed, sleeping on (grimy!!) dog bed]

[in species-appropriate bed, when he was much tinier]

• 55D: Word before food or mate (SOUL) — I am remarkably bad at "word that can follow/precede x or y"-type clues. The RAIDED clue, which I also struggled with, is also in this same family of clue (19D: Like speakeasies and refrigerators, at times)

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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