Self-effacing personality trait / SAT 9-20-25 / Slower, musically / Verso's counterpart / Drink drunk the morning after, maybe / Hill folk, informally / Demand upon reaching an "enemy border" / Catholic university in Florida or its home town / Strip of wood from which a bow is carved / Rare showbiz collections / Actor Millen of BBC America's "Orphan Black"

Constructor: Katie Hoody

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ECHOISM (38D: Self-effacing personality trait) —

[this meaning of ECHOISM is not in dictionaries] [there are other meanings of ECHOISM] [This seems like a pop psychology thing ... I had to go to some article in Psychology Today to get a kind of definition (all my options seem flimsy)]

 1. What is echoism? Echoism is a trait that my colleagues and I have begun measuring, and like all traits, it exists to a greater or lesser degree in everyone. People who score well above average in echoism qualify as echoists, and their defining characteristic is a fear of seeming narcissistic in any way.

Of all the people we measured, echoists were the most “warm-hearted,” but they were also afraid of becoming a burden, felt unsettled by attention, especially praise, and agreed with statements like, “When people ask me my preferences, I’m often at a loss.” Where narcissists are addicted to feeling special, echoists are afraid of it.

In the myth of Narcissus, Echo, the nymph who eventually falls madly in love with Narcissus, has been cursed to repeat back the last few words she hears. Like their namesake, echoists definitely struggle to have a voice of their own. (Psych. Today)

 • • •

Another properly tough puzzle. I haven't applied the word "Easy" to a puzzle since Tuesday. Quite a streak. Why are you drinking STALE BEER the next morning? (13D: Drink drunk the morning after, maybe). I could not get my head around that at all. Are you a truly desperate alcoholic? Did you mistake it for water? Is it some kind of hangover cure that I'm unaware of? There is no context where drinking STALE BEER makes any kind of sense, especially "the morning after" ("the morning after" is also a weird phrase choice here, since "the morning after" pill is emergency contraception). STALE BEER and two names I've never seen in my life (ARI whoever, ALEC whoever) made that NE corner probably the hardest section. Thank god RECTO was a gimme (16A: Verso's counterpart); I was really floundering up there even with its help. Without it ... that would've been yikes. Somehow [Charcoal and wood, for two] didn't end in an "S"! Gah. I forget what I had in there, but it was (also) art-related and felt good. Another "not an 'S'!?!" plural ending at 34D: Sounds from 59-Across ("HO HO"). I watched Kate & Allie and still had trouble parsing MOTHERS (39A: Kate and Allie of 1980s TV, e.g.). I was like ... "roommates ... CO-STARS? ..."  So yeah, from the bottom to the top, that NE quadrant was the one that slowed me down the most. Outside of that corner, things were less brutal, but never easy. 

I basically liked the puzzle, except for the STALE BEER clue, which doesn't compute, and the ECHOISM / MENO MOSSO area. I don't really believe in ECHOISM. Seems like a thing made up in relationship to narcissism. I mean, Echo is Narcissus's counterpart, after all. A pop psychology term that isn't even in the dictionary? Boo. And MENO MOSSO is some deep-cut musical tempo indication (60A: Slower, musically). It's been a big week for "Italian words on scores," and this one ... I just had to piece together from my vague awareness of both Italian and music. That corner was really rescued by "I GOTTA JET!" (55A: "Later!") and SMOKE RING (58A: Blow it!)—I correctly guessed, right away, that it might JET and not the more common RUN, so I didn't get tripped up there, and as for SMOKE RING ... I remember lying in my dorm room smoking during senior year, surrounded by styrofoam coffee cup ashtrays, blowing SMOKE RINGs at the ceiling and thinking "I think if I couldn't blow SMOKE RINGs, I would quit." That's how much fun they were to me. I liked to blow one and then blow a smaller one right through it. I have very few "life skills," but blowing SMOKE RINGs is definitely one of them. (I eventually quit and haven't touched a cigarette since the early '00s, don't worry.)

Puzzle started out hard, but I was able to grab hold of just enough short answers to get started. There's a Catholic University named ST. LEO? There's a town named ST. LEO? News to me x 2 (1D: Catholic university in Florida or its home town). Also, this is garbage crosswordese, why would you clue it as hard as possible, thereby making it even more annoying? Also, there should be an abbr. indicator in the clue. Just an awful way to start out. But after reading many clues I couldn't get, I managed to put in EDEN, TWA, and ARGOTS (very proud of that last one). The "W" and "R" from those last two helped me see the "THAT" in "SCREW THAT!" (1A: "Hell no!") and the WARS in TRADE WARS (15A: New customs might incite them). God bless those little gimmes—they made a huge difference. I don't have much orange ink in the other sections of my puzzle (my green pen ran out so I've been using this tepid orange—gotta get over to Staples this weekend). My puzzle printouts, which I mark up and annotate before writing, tend to have the most ink where the biggest problems are. The whole western half of the grid only has ink around ST. LEO and OSMIC (lol, like I know anything about [squints] electron microscopy). But that SW section was both the last one I did and the easiest. OSMIC was a ???, but it fell into place from crosses pretty easily. This was a solid puzzle, even if I did have only an OK time solving it.

[9D: Who wrote "Humankind cannot bear very much reality"]

Bullets:

• 20A: Hill folk, informally (POLS) — so, Capitol Hill. Not hillbillies or, you know, ants or something.
• 29A: Sports org. in a 1976 merger (ABA) — basketball! My mind went to football (AFL), but the AFL / NFL merger officially took place several years earlier, in 1970.
• 51A: Strip of wood from which a bow is carved (STAVE) — if it's not barrel-related, then I have no idea what STAVE you're talking about (unless it's in the verb phrase "STAVE off"). Bow carving? Like electron microscopy and (apparently) pop psychological terms, not my purview. 
• 42D: Demand upon reaching an "enemy border" ("KING ME!") — oh yeah, and we can add checkers terminology to the list as well. Do you really call the row closest to your opponent the "enemy border," or are those words in "quotation marks" because you might think of the row that way? The quotation marks would then be acting like the qualifying phrase "so to speak." Haven't played checkers since I was a small child.
• 47D: Sheets might be placed in them (OVEN) — When they come out of the drier less warm than you'd like, then sure, just pop them in the OVEN on 200 for 10 min or so! A great wintertime life hack! (jk the "sheets" here are baking sheets)
• 56D: Result of the '64 Clay/Liston fight (TKO) — had the "T" and wrote in TIE. Then thought, "wait, what? No ..." Then the crosswordese kicked in.

That's it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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