Quite some time, antonymously / TUE 11-11-25 / 2021 Pixar film inspired by Italian folklore / Canada's features a unicorn / 1957 Danny & the Juniors hit about a school dance / One singing "The Lonely Goatherd," e.g. / First coin to use the $ symbol / Leaders in assists, typically

Constructor: Christina Iverson and Scott Hogan

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (if your time was faster than usual, consider that the grid was smaller than usual)

THEME: [It's hard to say] — wording of the clues for three theme answers is the same:

Theme answers:

• "WHO REALLY KNOWS?" (16A: "It's hard to say")
• "THAT WAS MY FAULT" (37A: It's hard to say)
• WORCESTSHIRE (59A: It's hard to say)

Word of the Day: "The Lonely Goatherd" (55A: One singing "The Lonely Goatherd," e.g. => YODELER) —

"The Lonely Goatherd" is a popular show tune from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music.

The song is well known for its examples of yodeling, a part of the traditional music of the Austrian Alps, where the musical is set. (Maria von Trapp, however, found the yodeling in the motion picture version of The Sound of Music rendition to be lacking in authenticity.) (wikipedia)

• • •

Is it really so hard to say "THAT WAS MY FAULT"? Or WORCESTERSHIRE, for that matter. The latter is very hard to spell, I'll grant you, but saying it, not at all. Yes, I guess if you had never heard of the place/sauce and someone just threw that word at you, you'd be inclined to throw in an extra syllable or two, but lots of words are pronounced in unintuitive ways. Once you know, it's not exactly a tongue twister. That's not to say that I don't think the basic concept here is cute. You have the same clue (give or take a couple quotation marks) for each grid-spanning answer, and the sense of that clue changes each time (the first time we're looking for an equivalent phrase, the next two times we're looking for the "It," and it's the sense of "say" that changes (from "utter" in the second theme clue, to "pronounce" in the third). It's a neat accomplishment to get three answers that perfectly fit the space, more or less fit the clue, and changed the sense of the clue each time (I'm just noticing now that the grid is 14 wide today, not the typical 15—this hardly matters as far as theme quality goes, just an interesting physical anomaly). I didn't love the theme, but I think it's conceptually strong and well executed. 

The long Downs helped enhance the solving experience today—six 8+-letter answers, all of them humming. Well, maybe not SERGEANT, which isn't so much humming as ho-humming, but the rest are really nice. I've got quibbles with two of the clues on these answers, though. TEAM PLAYERS is more a metaphorical concept than an actual sports concept. The person with the most assists on a team is just doing their job. Some players are great shooters, some are great passers. Both are TEAM PLAYERS. And someone with a lot of assists might also be an egomaniacal nightmare to play with. "Assists" is just a stat. Yes, it's good to share, but passing the ball (or puck or whatever) is just part of the game; it doesn't necessarily convey what the phrase "TEAM PLAYERS" is meant to convey, metaphorically. Also, I do not like the "antonymously" part of the clue on A HOT MINUTE (10D: Quite some time, antonymously). Your problem here is "HOT," the antonym of which is "COLD," but the clue isn't talking about "HOT," it's talking about the fact that a minute is not literally a "long time" (unless you've got your hand pressed to a hot stovetop—that would be A (very) HOT MINUTE, and also feel like an eternity, probably). I see what "antonymously" is trying to do (even though my software is angrily underlining the very word "antonymously" in hot red), but the "HOT" part is unaccounted for in such a formulation. Further, "A MINUTE" means "a long time" all on its own, slangily. "It's been a minute" means, counterintuitively, "it's been a while." The "HOT" part is just ... extra. What makes this even stranger is that "A HOT MINUTE" can mean a long period time or a very short period of time! It's true. So ... I like the phrase, but the cluing feels ... confusing. Not quite right.

[39D: 1957 Danny & the Juniors hit about a school dance]

The short fill on this one was far less inspiring. I don't expect short to be inspiring at all, really, but I don't expect it to be ... less stale than this: TOLET ENTRE NON EEL OTTER TAO RELO TOME YESM ROWE NYSE ASONE SFO TRON TET (à) TÊTE AAA and the horrific how-do-you-spell-that pairing of AAHS and EWW. Of these, those high on my "please not again" list are RELO (despise) YESM (come on, since when?) ASONE (awk standalone) and ROWE (appears in crosswords much more than his "fame" warrants).  Further, it was disappointing to see ERAS clued yet again (and again and again and again) as a Taylor Swift thing, like, ugh, yes, that tour was massive, but Fearless and Folklore are just albums, not ERAS, please stop. ERAS is gonna appear over and over in crosswords, it just is, and it's a fine, real word, so I don't really mind, but any creative clue writer should stop using Swift to clue it for like five years. I declare a moratorium! Use her all you want in clues for other stuff, but the ERA/S angle is played out.

[25D: Singer with the 1998 #1 hit "Nice & Slow"]

Bullets:

• 53D: "You talkin' ___?" ("TO ME") — the generous take on this clue is that it's a deliberate callback to this past Sunday's first themer ("YOU TALKIN' TO ME"). The less generous take (my take) is that TOME is a perfectly good standalone word, go ahead and treat it that way, and if you are really committed to making it a partial, don't use the quote you Just Used Two Days Ago.

• 9A: Building with a "broad side," in an idiom (BARN) — I know this solely from the idiom "couldn't hit the broad side of a BARN," used for someone with particularly bad aim. Yes, that appears to be the one and only way this idiom is used. I like the idiom. I use it. It's colorful. Something about the alliteration. And the absurdity / anachronism of the image (I know that BARNs still exist, but most of us don't live near them, let alone throw at them).
• 24A: 2021 Pixar film inspired by Italian folklore (LUCA) — I confuse animated film titles. Badly. Esp. the four-letter ones. I was thinking of COCO and ended up writing in COCA, which ... is more Colombian than Italian.
• 36A: The "N" of NGO (NON) — NON-Governmental Organization
• 17D: An elver is a young one (EEL) — Time was [chews on straw] [whittles] you'd have to know all about EELs if you wanted to solve a crossword. Like that you catch EELs in an EELPOT and an EELER was also known as a "sniggler." Heck, the grid used to be teeming with ELVERs! And CONGERs and MORAYs. But the old ways have fallen off. These days, folks don't know what "elver" means any more. It's a dang shame. So I'm glad this clue's here to teach 'em. [OK the grid was never "teeming" with ELVERs, but you would see them!]

[xwordinfo]

• 26D: Canada's features a unicorn (COAT-OF-ARMS) — I didn't even know Canada had a COAT-OF-ARMS. But then I never saw this clue; it just sort of filled itself in.
• 28D: One of the five W's (WHY) — had this as WHO, then got the first themer ("WHO REALLY KNOWS?") and thought, "oh, that's bad." Then looked at WHO and thought "ohhhhh. It's probably not WHO." And the "Y" went in—and, appropriately, it went into the answer "THAT WAS MY FAULT."

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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