Mark Twain farce about painter who fakes his own demise / SUN 2-11-18 / As-yet-undeciphered Cretan script / First mass consumer product offering wifi / Buoyant cadences / Runner Liddell depicted in Chariots of Fire

Constructor: Matt Ginsberg

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: PARONOMASIA — this is a word that means "play on words; pun" ... I don't know if PARONOMASIA is supposed to sound like something else, or ... what. The theme answers appear to be oronyms, which is a word I just learned from the crossword a few days ago ("a string of words or a phrase that sounds the same as another string of words or phrase, but is spelt differently")

Theme answers:

• ORCHESTRATES (orca straits)
• LOCOMOTION (Lowe commotion)
• LOCKSMITH (lox myth)
• GROUPIES (grew peas)
• GERIATRICIAN (Jerry attrition)
• WHEATIES (wee tees)
• BORDEAUX (bore dough)
• MOUSETRAPS (Mao straps)
• IDEALOGUES (idea logs) (isn't the word "ideologues"?)
• STRATOSPHERE (stratus fear)
• MISTLETOE (missile tow)
• DULCIMER (dull simmer)
• PROFITEERING (prophet earring)
• PHARMACIST (farm assist)

Word of the Day: EDH (4D: Old English letter) —

noun

noun: edh

1. an Old English letter, ð or Ð, representing the dental fricatives T͟H and TH. It was superseded by the digraph th, but is now used as a phonetic symbol for the voiced dental fricative T͟H in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) system. (google)

So, these Sunday numbers just got worse:

I have no idea why it is so hard to make a decent Sunday puzzle, but it sure seems to be. This was a death march. Just a horrible, painful idea that Would Not End. Imagine thinking you were going to make it better by *adding* theme answers—as many as you can, crossing each other, in every nook and cranny. "Idea logs? Hilarious!" quips someone I cannot imagine. "Jerry attrition" is as close to clever as these paranomawhatevers ever come, and nothing else about the grid is even remotely endearing. I got some mail in January that essentially said "you should lighten up on the Sunday puzzles." No. No. Sundays should lighten up on me. This is abuse. The marquee puzzle has become a joke. Again, I refer you to Evan Birnholz's WaPo Sunday Crossword, which even on a so-so day is better than this. Why don't more people recognize this objective reality? (marketing, inertia, blah blah blah, I actually know the answers here, but it's still annoying).


Can't you do this crap with tons of words. From this grid alone: DINETTES (dye nets?); SENILE (scene aisle?); O'CASEY (okay, see...?); ARLENE (are lean?); RAMBO (ram beau?). Etc. The theme stuff is sooooo dense that none of the rest of the puzzle can breathe. The grid is strangulated by theme overgrowth. An invasive species of theme. Theme kudzu. It's an ecotastrophe. I could assail the overly common and crosswordesey stuff in this grid, but why bother? It's a bust. A total bust. Gonna go watch some minor Olympic sports to wash the taste of this puzzle out of my brain. Before you go saying "oh, you're getting so negative blah blah blah," I liked Thursday and Friday and Saturday a whole lot, and my puzzle approval trendline is actually up this year, and markedly so.


So there.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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