French tennis player fashion icon / SAT 8-31-19 / Classic TV character whose name is Spanish for fool / 1980s feminst coinage regarding nuclear proliferation

Constructor: Brian Thomas

Relative difficulty: Easy (4:31, should've been even faster)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Georges PEREC (25A: French author Georges) —

Georges Perec (born George Peretz) (French: [peʁɛk, pɛʁɛk]; 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play. (wikipedia)

Oulipo (French pronunciation: ​[ulipo], short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature") is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior, Jean Lescure and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy".
Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's "story-making machine", which he used in the construction of Life A User's Manual. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec's novel A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new methods, often based on mathematical problems, such as the knight's tour of the chess-board and permutations. (wikipedia) 

I would not be surprised if many of you set a personal best Saturday time today. I didn't, but I probably should have. Too leisurely out of the gate, and too clumsy on the keyboard. And then, at the very end, I face-planted by totally misreading 53A: Viscous (ROPY) as [Vicious]. Ugh. Anyway, 4:31 is still very fast for a Saturday, for me. Looking back over the puzzle, it's basically a Tuesday with a few marginal proper nouns and dated phrases thrown in to act as very ineffective speed bumps. I knew PEREC, but you are very much forgiven if you didn't. I wouldn't know him if it weren't for crosswords, and I know I'm not alone in that. My proper noun downfall was TANIKA (?) Ray, co-host of "Extra," whatever that is. Is that some kind of entertainment news TV show—a form that it's hard to believe still exists. I'm not even going to check because I don't care. Anyway, all the crosses were favorable, so TANIKA didn't crush me, but she definitely held me up. The other major hold-up came from MISSILE ENVY (29A: 1980s feminst coinage regarding nuclear proliferation), which ... really? Really? Sigh. If you say so. "Feminist coinage?" What's "feminist" about it? Who is the feminist involved here? I get that it's a play on "penis envy," but ... it really doesn't sound like a term that is in common parlance, or ever was. So I needed a Ton of crosses to get it, but again, the crosses were not at all hard, so fine. I'm startled that this was a Saturday and not a Friday. Hard to fathom. It really was very, very easy (by Saturday standards).


A word about TONTO (15A: Classic TV character whose name is Spanish for "fool"). A few words, actually. First, The Lone Ranger was a radio show and a book series before it was a TV show, and TONTO was in the pre-TV stuff, yet the puzzle keeps narrowly cluing him via the TV show. Second, while "tonto" does mean "fool" in Spanish (which meant the name was changed to "Toro" or "Ponto" in Spanish-dubbed versions of the TV show), the creator had reason to believe it meant something else: "Show creator Trendle grew up in Michigan, and knew members of the local Potawatomi tribe, who told him it meant "wild one" in their language" (wikipedia). The clue kind of implies, or softly suggests, that the "fool" meaning was by design. Maybe this clue is the puzzle's way of pointing out that the character of TONTO was very much the product of white ignorance. Native Americans have long criticized the character as a form of racial caricature. Johnny Depp's portrayal of TONTO in the 2013 "Lone Ranger" caused a fairly high-profile backlash, with accusations of appropriation and racial insensitivity being leveled at the movie and its star (ironic, given that the movie was intended to offer a more authentic TONTO, rejecting earlier portrayals of the character as a mere monosyllabic sidekick). This is all to say that the character of TONTO is inextricably linked to a long history of white writers, producers, actors, etc. representing Native Americans in simplistic ways with little or any input from Native Americans themselves. I know some people who don't ever want to see TONTO in the grid again. I'm not sure I agree, but I do understand. If I felt I absolutely had to use TONTO to make a stellar grid come out right, I'd probably stick to very straightforward, factual cluing. Don't get cute.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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