Young gallant in Romeo and Juliet / MON 5-6-19 / 1990s Indiana governor Evan / Coastal resort areas / Mortar accompanier / Sandwich chain whose name is French for ready to eat / Fish by dragging net

Constructor: Peter Gordon

Relative difficulty: Medium (3:02)

THEME: EYE / RHYMES (59D: With 65-Across, what the last words of 18-, 35- and 56-Across are to each other) — sure, OK (see long def. of EYE / RHYMES in write-up, below):

Theme answers:

• TEXAS RANGER (18A: Lone Star State baseball player)
• CLOTHES HANGER (35A: What you might drape a dress or shirt on in a closet) (I would not "drape" a shirt on a hanger—I would H A N G it on a hanger)
• PRÊT-À-MANGER (56A: Sandwich chain whose name is French for "ready to eat")

Word of the Day: PATOOT (4D: Tushie) —

Noun

1. Alternative form of patootie.  

patootie noun

Patootie is an attractive girl or a girlfriend, or is a slang term to refer to someone's buttocks.

(yourdictionary.com)

Hey all. Did not expect to be blogging tonight and don't really have much time, so ... uh, EYE / RHYMES, eh? People know what these are? I have a Ph.D. in English and I've barely ever heard of the concept. It's such a dumb concept. Things rhyme or they don't. Slant rhymes are imperfect rhymes where just the vowel sound or the consonant sounds are alike. Those I know. EYE / RHYMES just means they look alike but are pronounced differently? OK. Answers are tremendously arbitrary. Why this rhyme? Why these answers? Lots of things are EYE / RHYMES. Cough / rough / dough. Where's that puzzle? You gotta bring more theme cohesion than this. The worst thing, though, was the severely awkward revealer placement. Intersecting non-symmetrical two-word phrase. EYE AYE AYE, not lovely. Happy to say BAYH to this one.


Just looked up EYE / RHYMES on wikipedia and it's bizarre, since ... well, here's the entire main entry:

An eye rhyme, also called a visual rhyme or a sight rhyme, is a  rhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently.^[1] An example is the name of English actor Sean Bean, whose name based on its visual aspect looks like it should be pronounced "Seen Been", but when spoken, there is no rhyming quality.

Many older English poems, particularly those written in Middle English, contain rhymes that were originally true or full rhymes, but as read by modern readers, they are now eye rhymes because of shifts in pronunciation, especially the Great Vowel Shift. These are called historic rhymes. Historic rhymes are used by linguists to reconstruct pronunciations of old languages, and are used particularly extensively in the reconstruction of Old Chinese, whose writing system does not allude directly to pronunciation.

One example of a historic rhyme (i.e. one which was a true rhyme which is now an eye rhyme), is the following:

The great man down, you mark his favourite flies;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.

— Player King, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act III, scene II

When Hamlet was written around 1600, "flies" and "enemies" rhymed in local dialects, but as a result of the shifts in pronunciation since then, the original rhyme has been lost.

So ... we're really talking about "historic rhymes," mostly. I encounter these all the time in the poetry I teach. Never heard them called "EYE / RHYMES." For instance: "... and find / What wind / Serves to advance an honest mind" is a line from Donne's "Song (1)"—"find""wind" and "mind" all rhymed in the early 17th century, though they do not now. I did not know the words in question there were "EYE / RHYMES," and I have no plans to start calling them that. Anyway ... if EYE / RHYMES are just historic rhymes, then ... they're not really a poetic device so much as an effect of language change over time. . . So this theme doesn't really make much sense if "hanger" and "ranger" never used to rhyme (did they?), and it *especially* doesn't make sense if one of the "rhymes" in question is from another language (!?).


Bullets:

• PATOOT (4D: Tushie)— ew, no, delete all of this cutesie anatomical garbage 
• GAM (58D: Pod of whales)— we call that a "pod"; a GAM is a gun moll's shapely leg or it's nothing
• RIVIERAS (39D: Coastal resort areas)— I doubt the pluralizability of this word. Unless you are talking about multiple Buicks, this word shouldn't be plural
• AXMEN (55A: Lumberjacks)— Ugh. Had AXERS. AXMEN are guitar players.
• OMAR (53D: Minnesota representative Ilhan ___) — very glad I knew her because she forced me to quickly ditch my first (wrong) answer for that last themer. I knew the Sandwich chain was mostly a to-go-type place, and since I know the French word for "carry" (as in "carry out"????), I went straight to "PRÊT-À-PORTER" ... ("porter" means both "to carry" annnnd "to wear") 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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