Half of former sitcom duo / FRI 11-22-19 / Summa cum laude spoiler / Animals whose name is derived from Latin for little thief / Troubadour's accompaniment / Black Jeopardy show for short

Constructor: Emily Carroll

Relative difficulty: Easy (4:24)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: SITUATIONSHIP (32A: Romantic gray area) —

A situationship is essentially a relationship that hasn't been defined. So anything that precedes the DTR (define the relationship) conversation but follows the initial first few dates (Women's Health)

Solid B PLUS, though the clue on B PLUS is terrible—*any* grade that isn't "A" can be a [Summa cum laude spoiler] and also yuck to the whole aspirational quality of that clue. Nobody cares if you're summa. No one will remember but you and your mom. Stop. B PLUS is a good grade. Yeesh. Anyway, this puzzle was a B PLUS, as I was saying. It was also super duper easy. I fat-fingered my way across the keyboard, typoing nonstop, and still ended up just 12 seconds shy of my fastest Friday time in two years. If only I had ever (even once) heard of SITUATIONSHIP, which is one of those words ... ugh, look, I don't use Urban Dictionary, on principle, and without Urban Dictionary, there's nowhere to go for a formal definition of this term, which I guess is some millennial thing like "adulting" or whatever. Not sure why it needed a name, since being involved without formally being involved has been a thing since forever, but sure, wacky sad new words, knock yourselves out. I turn 50 next week, and I am really feeling my "kids these days!" energy right now. I've also been married for a long time, so it's not that shocking that relationship neologisms would've missed me. My favorite part about solving that answer was getting SITUATION- and thinking "... wait, is this the SITUATION ROOM ... is the SITUATION ROOM the new FRIEND ZONE ... or, like, a hotter FRIEND ZONE but still awkward ... and why would you name it after a Wolf Blitzer show!?!?" So please, youths of today, instead of "we're in a SITUATIONSHIP," say "we're ... in the SITUATION ROOM!" And then say "dum dum DUM!" and kind of tilt your head a little—a little news anchor flourish. Do it. You'll like it.


Some very bad clues today. 27D: Some of them are described as red and yellow, but not orange (SEAS), ugh, no, so messed up. "Some of them"??? No, precisely one of them is red and precisely one of them is yellow and actually it's captial-R Red and capital-Y Yellow. Some of them, yeesh. Sometimes you have to back off your cutesy clue 'cause the phrasing just doesn't work. Also, "gray area" seems like a really bad way to describe SITUATIONSHIP. A specific, named thing is almost by definition not a "gray area." You'd never refer to any relationship you were in as an "area." Tin. Ear. Don't like that 9D was PATÉS instead of PATES. Avoid diacritical marks if possible, unless you can make them work in the crosses—let that be your guiding philosophy. Enter into a SITUATIONSHIP with diacritical marks, if you will (I have no idea what I mean here). Let's see, what else? There were exactly four places I got slowed down today—trying to parse USE CARE (15A: Be cautious); figuring out tail end of SITUATIONSHIP; seeing SURER, for some reason (44D: Having fewer reservations); and getting the last part of GOOFUS—I had GOOBER (38D: Stupid person, in slang). Only things I really didn't like today, fill-wise, were LEOI and DUIS. Long answers are solid, shorts are largely inoffensive, so ... B PLUS. Sorry about your summa, but you should still hold your head high, little puzzle.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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