Kicks down the road, as a decision / MON 3-16-26 / Stereotypical charmers / Hypothetical (one hopes!) global conflict, for short / After the event, as an analysis / Bronx-born congresswoman elected in 2018, familiarly / City that's home to the University of Maine

Constructor: Jamey Smith

Relative difficulty: Medium (solved Downs-only)

THEME: LATIN LOVERS (64A: Stereotypical charmers ... or those charmed by the answers to the starred clues?) — familiar Latin phrases

Theme answers:

• AD INFINITUM (17A: *Forever)
• SUI GENERIS (25A: *One of a kind)
• MAGNUM OPUS (31A: *Masterwork)
• POST MORTEM (46A: *After the event, as an analysis)
• QUID PRO QUO (51A: *Reciprocal exchange)

["et cetera et cetera, AD INFINITUM, ad astra, forever, and ever..."]

Word of the Day: SUI GENERIS (25A) —

Sui generis is a Latin phrase that means "of its/their own kind" or "in a class by itself", therefore "unique". It denotes an exclusion to the larger system an object is in relation to.

Several disciplines use the term to refer to unique entities. These include:

• Biology, for species that do not fit into a genus that includes other species (its own genus)
• Creative arts, for artistic works that go beyond conventional genre boundaries (its own genre)
• Law, when a special and unique interpretation of a case or authority is necessary (its own special case)
  • Intellectual property rights, for types of works not falling under general copyright law but protected through separate statutes
  • Laws of war, for types of actions that are argued to be legal due to exceptional circumstances in conflict
• Philosophy, to indicate an idea, an entity, or a reality that cannot be reduced to a lower concept or included in a higher concept (its own category) (wikipedia)

• • •

[this cover gives me grad school flashbacks]

So it's a bunch of Latin phrases? That's it? Somehow LATIN LOVERS is not nearly enough to elevate this above the level of "mere random list." No "Love" content here at all. People who do not "love" Latin use these terms all the time. They're basic terms that have made their way into the English language. The least familiar of these is almost certainly SUI GENERIS, a term I sometimes use now but one that I don't think I really understood until way into adulthood. The others I've known since I was a child. On the whole, this feels conceptually uninspired. Plus the fill is pretty stale. I like PUNTS ON alright (not pretty, but colloquial and fresh-feeling to me), and GATE AGENT's OK I guess, but OBIT PAGES felt janky ("pages," plural? That's a lot of deaths ... and anyway, I think we just call them the "obituaries" or the "obits"), and beyond that, there's just a lot of crosswordese. Haven't seen OLLAS in a while. You know it's crosswordese when Spelling Bee is like "nope, not a word" (trust me, I've tried ... a lot). ORONO is another I'd know nothing about if it weren't for crosswords, particularly crosswords from the '90s. Ha, the data confirms it!: Mid-'90s! Peak ORONO! (34D: City that's home to the University of Maine)

[1997: 12 appearances—more than all ORONO appearances in the last decade combined]

TASER is always grim. Never happy to see it. But I'm way happier to see TASER than I am ****ing WWIII right now (7D: Hypothetical (one hopes!) global conflict, for short). "One hopes!" Yes, LOL, hilarious! Fingers crossed! Somehow this answer doesn't seem that funny to me right now, coming as it does in the middle of an undeclared war being waged by total incompetents who have the most powerful military on the planet but absolutely no strategy, no end game, no organized international support, and historically low support at home. What could go wrong?! Earlier today (Sunday), I went to see SIRAT, a harrowing, brutal, relentless movie that takes place against the backdrop of a very ill-defined and never directly-shown military conflict that feels a hell of a lot like WWIII. This is all to say that I was in no mood to appreciate the cutesiness of the WWIII clue. I guess actual WWIII remains "hypothetical," but pffffffft I dunno, man. It's all a little too plausible at the moment for me to be able to chuckle at it.

As usual, the longer answers were the trouble spots in my Downs-only solve. OBIT PAGES took a lot of inferred crosses. PUNTS ON was PUTS OFF at first (4D: Kicks down the road, as a decision). My [Italian cheese] was ASIAGO before it was ROMANO, and my [Rx writers] were DRS before they were MDS. Wasn't sure about the second vowel in "OVI-" (67D: Prefix meaning "egg"). Now that I write it out, "OVA-" does seem pretty unlikely, since OVA are the eggs themselves. OVO is Latin for "egg." It really could only have been OVI-. But still, I was cautious, and left the final letter blank until SISTER came along and confirmed the "I." Most dangerous error of the day was DUVET for QUILT (54D: Warm bed covering). One thing I will say about this theme—it really, really helped with the Downs-only solve. Once I got a couple of Latin phrases, I knew to go looking for them, and QUID PRO QUO ended up being a real lifesaver—one I probably wouldn't have been able to infer so easily if I hadn't understood the theme. 

Gonna go watch the Oscars now, I think, for as long as I can stay awake. Take care, everyone. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. my wife’s aunt Sandra died last week and so my wife (Penelope) is off to NZ today to attend the memorial near Auckland. She wrote a really moving remembrance of Sandra yesterday. You don’t have to know either of them to appreciate it. ❤️ 

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