Old coupon for needy / MON 9-25-17 / Soupy oliver twist fare / Active during daytime

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (i.e. slightly harder than the average Monday puzzle, solely because of the crossing and cross-referenced themers)

THEME: hyphenated 10-letter adjectives where both halves (before and after the hyphen) intersect at the middle letter —

Theme answers:

• HANDY / DANDY (17A: With 3-Down, useful)
• HOITY / TOITY (19A: With 11-Down, snobbish)
• HOTSY / TOTSY (39A: With 29-Down, sophisticated)
• LOVEY / DOVEY (58A: With 48-Down, affectionate)
• NAMBY / PAMBY (60A: With 51-Down, weak and indecisive)

Word of the Day: DIURNAL (43D: Active during the daytime) —

adjective

adjective: diurnal

1. 1.

   of or during the day.

   synonyms:

   daily, everyday, quotidian, occurring every/each day "the patient's moods are determined by diurnal events"

   • Zoology

     (of animals) active in the daytime.
   • Botany

     (of flowers) open only during the day.
2. 2.

   daily; of each day.

   
   

   "diurnal rhythms"

   
   

   synonyms:

   daily, everyday, quotidian, occurring every/each day "the patient's moods are determined by diurnal events" (google)

Hey all. I hope you had fun in my absence. Many thanks to my sterling stand-ins, Lena and Laura, who responded to my emergency call. Actually, it was a double emergency. Emergency 1: my internet got (mysteriously) shut off. Just ... dead. All remedies useless. All technical assistance futile. Didn't get back up til today, when the cable guy got out of his van, took one look up the pole, and said, "Yeah, your cable was mistakenly disconnected." Good to know! And then there was Emergency 2: I had urgent business in New York City on Friday. You see, it was my daughter's 17th birthday, and somebody (possibly the world's greatest father) got her (and her best friend!) tickets to see some show called ... [checks Playbill] ... "Hamilton"? Have you heard of it? Grudgingly, my wife and I came along as chaperones:

Basically the (absolutely real) internet outage neatly coincided with my Broadway plans. Some tragedies have upsides. Note: Today's puzzle is not one of those tragedies. The quaintness here is cloying. Also, I don't think anyone says HOTSY / TOTSY ... like, ever. Wasn't one part of that expression recently in a grid? And it made everyone groan in anguish and the horribleness? Yes, I'm sure that happened. I honestly don't even know what HOTSY / TOTSY means. I would not have guessed [Sophisticated]. Sounds more like [Having pretensions to sophistication]. So befuddled was I by the expression that I spent many seconds looking at HO-SY / TO-SY wondering what else could work there *besides* the "T." My second biggest theme answer objection related to NAMBY-PAMBY, which is pejorative slang for a "weak and indecisive *man*." It's basically related to SISSY and therefore can f*** right off. It's meant to suggest "effeminacy," and it's meant to suggest it negatively (duh), so pfffftfefpfdgt bite me.


FOOD STAMP in the singular is weird—never seen it that way before (33A: Old coupon for the needy). DIURNAL is a pretty high-and-in-fastball SAT word, but I must've picked it up in some poetry class somewhere. Sounds Wordsworthian. Oh, snap! I just googled [Diurnal poem] and Wordsworth was the first hit! Shout-out to Arden Reed, my Romantic Poetry professor (Spring 1990). Some of it stuck!

Overall, the fill is just OK, but about as polished as it has any right to be given the onerous pressure the theme puts on the grid. BULLMOOSE is welcome in my grid any day (8D: Symbol of Teddy Roosevelt's political party).

Happy 11th birthday to this blog. The Bloggiversary is always a good time to revisit the first comment my blog ever got. A classic of its kind. Everything about it is so pure. Enjoy.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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