First name in women's tennis / WED 12-20-2017 / Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman / Japanese "yes"

Constructor: TALITHA RANDALL

Relative difficulty: EASY



THEME: CLOUD NINE — Horizontal theme answers are different ways to get nine by way of addition. So if basic arithmetic is your bag, this puzzle will have you on cloud nine.

Word of the Day: SONANT (59A: Voiced) —

adjective

1.

sounding; having sound.

2.

Phonetics. voiced (opposed to surd ).

noun, Phonetics.

3.

a speech sound that by itself makes a syllable or subordinates to itselfthe other sounds in the syllable; a syllabic sound (opposed toconsonant ).

4.

a voiced sound (opposed to surd ).

5.

(in Indo-European) a sonorant.

Hi, crossword friends. Andrea here. Longtime reader, first-time guest-blogger. I will confess more than a little anxiety about guest-blogging for Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld. I've been around this Internet of ours. I know what the comments section can be like (though this is true of any blog or website on any topic, including knitting and butter pecan ice cream ... aaaaand now you know exactly which corners of the Internet I frequent). Back when mousepads were a thing, I used to think my big, million-dollar idea was going to be marketing mousepads that said DON'T READ THE COMMENTS. On to the puzzle!

I thought this puzzle was a snooze. Right off the bat (does everyone start up there in the northwest corner? Or do some people start somewhere else? Like the way some people always read magazines from the back?), I was worried that the biggest surprise in this puzzle was going to be which spelling of TSAR/CZAR(1A: Russian ruler) we were looking at. From there, it was an unexciting jog through standard-issue answers. I paused for a moment on READER (16A: Bibliophile) and permitted myself a philosophical tangent. A bibliophile is someone who loves books, yes. But does that necessarily mean he or she is a reader? Aren't there bibliophiles who love books qua books but don't read them? And more interestingly (to me): people who read--even literature--but using an e-reader. Are those people readers but not bibliophiles? I kept filling the puzzle automatically as I pondered this, because it was more interesting than the fusty answers that make up this puzzle. Like GIN (24A: Game-ending cry at a card table) and RUDE(4D: Like cutting in line) and SASS(41A: Be flippant with) and TORNADO(35D: What transported Dorothy to Oz). These all just feel like they were pulled from a mothball-scented drawer in someone's aunt's house, not a fun aunt but like an aunt you have to stay with for two nights when your mom goes to have a baby and dad can't possibly be asked to "babysit" so you go stay at Aunt Faye's kind of weird-smelling apartment and she teaches you to play gin rummy and warns you not to sass her but she lets you watch The Wizard of Oz on TV before putting you to bed in a trundle bed without even spritzing detangler on your hair for you. Even the inclusion of LENA(28A: Dunham of "Girls") and MARC(25A: Designer Jacobs) felt like when a grown-up tries to dab or fidget-spin her way into the hearts of young people. This is a thing I am sensitive to as a middle-aged teacher of teenagers. All in all, this puzzle feels vintage in a squicky way.

Here is a picture of Lena Dunham wearing Marc Jacobs!



Theme answers, on which I refuse to spend a lot of words: 

• ONE and EIGHT is NINE
• FOUR and FIVE is NINE
• SEVEN and TWO is NINE

NINE, of course, was only half of the "theme." It was CLOUD NINE. When it comes to that idiom, I think the CLOUD part is more interesting than the NINE part. I would have loved to see in this puzzle tastier words like cirrus, cumulus, stratus, nimbus. Even miasma. Nebula. There are all these cool cloud words! Maybe even nine of them! Why are we doing arithmetic? Then again, I live in Phoenix. It was like 70 and sunny today. Of course I want clouds.



But look. There were a couple of neat things in this puzzle, though. Little echoes. We had both OVEST (6D: Sunset's direction, in Sorrento) and ESTE (18A: Sunrise's direction, in Sonora). TORPEDOS (14A: Nixes, as a proposal) calling to mind the aforementioned TORNADOS from elsewhere in the puzzle. These are nice and I guess sort of related to the cloud theme, in a loose way, or at least to the cloud theme I wish had been in this puzzle.

As a logophile (a thing you can be no matter how or where you read), I liked seeing INDEGENE (8D: Person native to an area) and SONANT (59A: Voiced), adjectives that are basically never used in informal spoken language and too infrequently even in writing.

Bullets:

• SARGE (27A: V.I.P. at boot camp) — can't read this word without thinking of Beetle Bailey, which is a thing the totally fictional Aunt Faye probably likes along with her cigarettes in the morning. 

• LIAISE (58A: Network (with)) — according to the most cursory Internet research, this is a back-formation from "liaison."  I'm into that. I've been reading John McWhorter's Words on the Move and so I am feeling especially wiggly and descriptivist about language these days. Wheeee! 
• WEIR (40D: Small dam) — This is a good word to know for Scrabble and crosswords, plus it reminds me of Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, which reminds me of my brother Chris. But then I am also reminded how Bob Weir, like, welcomed John Mayer into the Grateful Dead family over Twitter this year and I am uncomfortable all over again. 
• SONANT (59A: Voiced)— I picked this as my Word of the Day because it's lovely and sort of rare but totally up-front about what it means (SON- = sound) and also because it looks a bit like the word Sonata, which is--look at that!--the name of my book that came out in May and which Rex Parker nudged me to put in a little plug for. So if you are a logophile or a bibliophile or both, if you like music, maybe you'll consider checking it out here or, better yet, at your local, independent bookstore. 

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