Open one-seated horse-drawn carriage / SAT 10-21-17 / Duke legend to fans / Mideast's city of jasmine / Toon who often congratulated himself with you've done it again / Dweller between zambezi limpopo rivers / Locale of Dostoyevsky's exile

Constructor: Samuel A. Donaldson and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium



THEME: none 

Word of the Day: SEGNO (25A: Score mark indicating a passage to be repeated) —

In music notation, Dal segno (/ˌdælˈseɪnjoʊ/ or /ˈsɛɡnoʊ/; Italian pronunciation: [dal ˈseɲɲo]), often abbreviated D.S., is used as a navigation marker. From Italian for "from the sign," D.S. appears in sheet music and instructs a musician to repeat a passage starting from the sign shown at right, sometimes called the "segno" in English. (wikipedia)

This one had a raft of borderline obscurities (SEGNO, MASSIF, ANSELM, bleepin'STANHOPE!), but I'd seen them all before (actually ANSELM I just straight-up knew, yay medievalism). The answer that ended up giving me the most trouble was, weirdly, HOT PEPPER EMOJIS (55A: Sext symbols). Do people really do that? Send sexts w/ HOT PEPPER EMOJIS in them? I know that emoji as an indication of someone's relative attractiveness, but if you're sexting someone, presumably that symbol is unnecessary. Unless it's being used for its roughly phallic shape, in which case ...?! I am saying that I have trouble believing that said emojis are related to sexting. Related to indicating that you find someone hot, yes. But you'd use it more in a public declaration—like if you find a celebrity hot, maybe (?). I just have trouble believing that in an actual sexting situation, you'd crack out the hot pepper emoji. Too easily confused with a burning sensation. As I'm typing all this, I am realizing that though the NYT has grown fond of the term "sext," I'm not sure it knows what one actually looks like. Hell, I'm not sure I do. Oh, hey, it looks like Bustle specifically identifies the hot pepper as a sexting emoji. But it also thinks taco is a sexting emoji, so ... I dunno.


While stuff like SYSTOLES and IN A TIE and SET MENU doesn't really float my boat, I appreciated some of the unusual shorter stuff like COACH K and "I'M LIKE..." I'm unfamiliar with the JOB JAR. I have seen the chore wheel before, but not the JOB JAR. Do you just, like, draw "jobs" out of the "jar"? According to Martha Stewart, apparently so. Back-to-back "Star Wars" answers in the crossword, both with the word ONE in the title. I have had "ROGUE ONE" on my Netflix watch list forever, and yet I somehow can never quite bring myself to ... watch it. Always something else that wants my attention more. Sorta surprised to see "lame" used the way it is in 26D: Lame (but eco-friendly) birthday gift (E-CARD). It's perfectly common colloquial usage, but definitely seen as ableist language in some corners. I don't think using "lame" in this way is blatantly offensive ... and yet I find that I've completely stopped using it, the way I completely stopped using "retarded" to mean generically "stupid" many, many years ago. Also, if you think an E-CARD is "lame" in real life, you should see it in a crossword grid ... :(

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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