Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Steve Mossberg

Constructor: Steve Mossberg

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: ily — familiar expressions have their last words turned into adverb (through addition of "ily"), and are clued as if the newly-made adverb referred to the cluing of the pre-adverb part of the sentence. So, in essence, the answers are the clues ... for the clues ... the answers end up describing the ways the theme clues are written:

Theme answers:

THE LAST WORDILY (20A: Something directly following a penultimate position — that is to say, diametrically opposed to primary one) (so ... the clue describes THE LAST and the clue is written WORDILY)
HOT MESSILY (34A: L iKe aN Ov eN) (so ... the clue describes HOT and the clue is written MESSILY)
HAY LOFTILY (39A: Golden blades that may be tenderly chew'd by equine or bovine beings) (clue describes HAY, is written LOFTILY)
ALL THAT JAZZILY (53A: The cat's meow, baby. Dig?) (clue describes ALL THAT, is written JAZZILY (is it, though...?)

Word of the Day: crystal jellies (29D: What crystal jellies do when disturbed) —

Aequorea victoria, also sometimes called the crystal jelly, is a bioluminescent hydrozoan jellyfish, or hydromedusa, that is found off the west coast of North America.
The species is best known as the source of two proteins involved in bioluminescence, aequorin, a photoprotein, and green fluorescent protein (GFP). Their discoverers, Osamu Shimomura and colleagues, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on GFP.

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Themes where the clue writing is *everything* are always dicey and usually fall flat because of the editorial voice. You have to be good, and funny, to make stuff like this land, and today, the clues were really off the mark. Forced, awkward, somewhat inaccurate or misleading. I literally heaved a heavy sigh when I got the first themer, as I realized two things. Well three. One, nonsense would be in the grid. Two, we would be in one of these "answers are really the clues" situations, which almost never go well. And three, we would be subject to three more stabs at humorous clue writing, the first of which, wow, did not go well. I'm just gonna type out the first theme clue again, so you can re-experience the magic: "Something directly following a penultimate position ... that is to say, diametrically opposed to a primary one." Awful clue writing is bad enough, but now we get not just a parody of awful clue writing, but a bad parody of it, which takes us from bad to possibly good to nope still bad again. It is painful to read this clue, which I get is the point, but still, painful is painful. If you're going to deliberately subject me to pain, man there had better be relief at the end. And there was not. The clue doesn't even describe THE LAST very well at all. First of all, you would (probably) never have THE LAST in a puzzle all on its own, so cluing it at all is a bizarre idea. Second, this clue doesn't even do that well; it's not "wordy" (which is what it's *supposed* to be) as confusing, inaccurate, and pompous. The clarifying phrase ("that is to say" and following) only obfuscates by using the word "diametrically," which brings shape or the idea of antithesis into the equation, neither of which has anything to do with THE LAST. What does "diameter" have to do with "(the) first" and "(the) last"? "Wordy" does not mean inaccurate or confusing, necessarily. Also, the clue isn't even that wordy relative to clues you see every day in the NYTXW. There are more words in the LEAR clue!!!!! I guess that makes this clue penultimately wordy, which is by far my favorite thing about this clue now—its ironic self-referentiality. This first theme clue is so important for setting the tone, and it was just so unpleasant. Other theme clues were better, but how could they not be? The whole concept left me pretty cold.

I kinda like the slanginess of HOT MESS and ALL THAT, which at least make the clues in those instances a little interesting. I worry about people not familiar with the expression "ALL THAT," which, yes, is decades old, but still might not be in some people's lexicons (there was a brief unfortunate period in the '90s when "all that and a bag of chips" was a popular expression). If you somehow missed the emergence of the expression ALL THAT (which OED dates to '89), it just means "something special" (i.e. as the clue says "the cat's meow" ... or "the cat's pajamas," I suppose. They sure liked their cats in the '20s ... or maybe it was one particularly awesome cat and people just lexically freaked out). "Cat's meow" is from the '20s and "Dig?" ... isn't ... and "baby" evokes Austin Powers, so I don't know what era or planet that clue is on, but at least it's entertaining, unlike the HAY LOFTILY clue (39A: Golden blades that may be tenderly chew'd by equine or bovine beings), which honestly sounds exactly like many ordinary NYTXW clues except for the ridiculous elided-e version of "chew'd." And about that: elision like that only happens in poetry, when you need to make the meter come out right (the elided "e" makes "chew'd" definitively one syllable, whereas without the elision, it could be pronounced with two). In poetry, elision might be "lofty," I guess, but in a prose crossword clue, it's nonsense. This clue and the first one are just cringey, whereas the other two at least have zaniness going for them. The fill, well, you can see, all 3 4 5s, nothing interesting going on. TOSH, ugh, that bit of archaic nonsense (I had BOSH!) crossing LATTE as clued (1D: Drink from a machine) was the worst. You use a machine to make a latte, "From a machine" makes it sound like it's dispensed out of a machine like an ICEE or something. Blargh. TOSH! The venerable AOL / NETZERO pairing tells you exactly how current the fill in this puzzle feels, generally (is NETZERO still a thing!?). But the fill's not bad. Just blah. Well, ONE TO GO is kinda bad. Like yesterday, this one relies entirely on its theme for entertainment. Unlike yesterday, this one couldn't execute the concept well at all.

Seems possible that the AT-AT / TARTT crossing might've flummoxed someone somewhere, but all the other names seem fairly crossed. That's all for today.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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