Ackbar's rank in Star Wars / SUN 6-4-17 / Cylinder-shaped pasta / It knits up the ravell'd sleave of care per macbeth

Constructor: Tom McCoy

Relative difficulty: Dunno—group-solved it as Doug Peterson read clues to us in the restaurant earlier this evening... Medium?

See, here's the screenshot of Doug's phone:


THEME:"Advice to Writers"— themers are ironic "rules"—ironic because they violate themselves

Word of the Day: John NANCE Garner (28D: Vice President John ___ Garner) —

John Nance Garner IV (November 22, 1868 – November 7, 1967), known among his contemporaries as "Cactus Jack", was an American Democratic politician and lawyer from Texas. He was a Texas state representative from 1898 to 1902, and U.S. Representative from 1903 to 1933. He was the 39th Speaker of the House from 1931 to 1933. In 1932 and 1936 he was elected the 32nd Vice President of the United States, serving from 1933 to 1941. A conservative Southerner, Garner opposed the sit-down strikes of the labor unions and the New Deal's deficit spending. He broke with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in early 1937 over the issue of enlarging the Supreme Court, and helped defeat it on the grounds that it centralized too much power in the President's hands. (wikipedia)

I have serious qualms about this theme, mainly because nearly every themer is lifted (with small changes for the purposes of answer-length/grid symmetry) from this list of "The Fumblerules" by William Safire. (Here's the direct link to the "On Language" column in question, from 1979). There are a couple of changes that are original and cute—most notably the repeated final themer (AVOID REDUNDANCY)—but even POOFREAD CARFULY, which is original in its misspelling conceit, plays off a base phrase that was lifted verbatim from Safire's list. I'm trying really hard to understand how this kind of appropriation without attribution is *not* a form of plagiarism. When you take someone else's ideas, their original work, and pass it off as your own ... yeah, that's what plagiarism is. I'm just ... trying to find a way around this. "It's just a crossword" is the only defense I can imagine, and as you can imagine, I find that defense fantastically pathetic. NEVER GENERALIZE is the only one here that seems entirely original, and (perhaps not surprisingly) it's also the weakest. I've seen puzzles that were obviously just "stuff from a list I found on the web" before, but I've never seen anything that seemed to be taking the work of one specific person before. It's disturbing.

Theme answers (Writing tips #1-7):

• NEVER GENERALIZE
• POOFREAD CARFULY (Safire: “Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.”)
• NO SENTENCE FRAGMENTS (Safire: “No sentence fragments.”)
• PASSIVES MUST BE SHUNNED (Safire:“The passive voice should never be used.”)
• DON'T USE CONTRACTIONS (Safire: “Don't use contractions in formal writing.”)
• AVOID REDUNDANCIES (Safire: “Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.”)
• AVOID REDUNDANCIES

I don't really care to comment more on this puzzle. Except OVERGO, which is hilarious in its non-wordness.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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