Clique's aspirations in modern lingo / SAT 12-21-19 / TV host fluent in eight languages / Either half of country duo with 14 #1 country hits / Bygone ad figure in tuxedo sunglasses / Bit of Communist Chinese attire

Constructor: Julian Lim

Relative difficulty: Easy-Challenging (I dunno, I solved it after waking from a nap, so it was probably Easyish but I couldn't make sense of the upper west coast to save my life)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: HOTSY-TOTSY (28A: A-O.K.) —

slang 

: comfortably stable or secure : PERFECT, OKhad a quarrel, but everything is hotsy-totsy now (coined about 1926 by Billie De Beck†1942 American cartoonist) (merriam-webster)

William Morgan DeBeck (April 15, 1890 – November 11, 1942), better known as Billy DeBeck, was an American cartoonist. He is most famous as the creator of the comic strip Barney Google, later retitled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. The strip was especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and featured a number of well-known characters, including the title character, Bunky, Snuffy Smith, and Spark Plug the race horse. Spark Plug was a merchandising phenomenon, and has been called the Snoopy of the 1920s.
DeBeck drew with a scratchy line in a "big-foot" style, in which characters had giant feet and bulbous noses. His strips often reflected his love of sports. In 1946, the National Cartoonists Society inaugurated the Billy DeBeck Memorial Awards (or the Barney Awards), which became the Reuben Award in 1954. [...] DeBeck is credited with introducing or popularizing a number of neologisms and catchphrases via Barney Google, including "heebie-jeebies", "horsefeathers", "hotsy totsy", "balls of fire", "time's a-wastin'", "touched in the head", and "bodacious". (wikipedia)

This 40-black-squares look, I don't know. Seems like a lot of real estate to cede to black squares on a Saturday. Last week's Saturday puzzle had just 30, and *that* one was 16-wide. The puzzle felt ... spindly. The huge black cross formations made me wonder if there wasn't going to be some kind of theme, some kind of visual ... pun or something. But no, there's just a ridiculous number of black squares. And for what? So that ... what can happen, exactly? It's a minor point, in the end, I guess, but I found this one aesthetically off-putting from the get-go. The grid was OK but the cluing seemed awkward and tin-eared in many places, and a couple of those marquee answers felt dated (in two very different ways). Let's start with HOTSY-TOTSY, which ... what? How does this clue not at least have an "in times of yore," or "in OLDEN-speak" tag on it. I've never heard a soul use this term—looks like it had its heyday in the '20s (nineteen-20s ... dang, I'm gonna have to start specifying!) (see "Word of the Day," above). It also looks like it means [Sexy, to your grandpa]. Maybe I'm extrapolating slightly from "hot to trot," I don't know. For a term that hasn't been popular in any way in my lifetime, I think you gotta do something better than just [A-O.K.]. Or, how's this, don't use it in the first place. It looks colorful (i.e. it has that wacky rhyming slangy thing going for it), but with no real currency, it's just going to be befuddling and annoying.
Differently dated, to my ear, is SQUADGOALS, which was a hot hashtag back in ... I wanna say 2015? (42A: Clique's aspirations, in modern lingo). Actually, as I write that, I get the feeling that I have written it before. And I have (earlier this year). I love current stuff in puzzles, but you gotta be fast. Memes and hashtags Do Not Age Well. I got SQUADGOALS easy, but that answer makes this puzzle look like an old person (i.e. me) desperately trying to seem young. Like when you try to use that term that the kids are using in front of your kid and your kid just rolls her eyes. Like when middle-aged white people started saying "bling." Like that. Here's an interesting article about how white people co-opted the term from black culture. I guess the main thing I want to stress here is you gotta use hot things while they're hot and then move on. Both jazz-era slang and social media hashtags have shelf lives that need to be respected. Hashtag shelf life is much, much shorter. I think SQUADGOALS still has currency (I got it easily enough, people are still using it on Twitter), but the fact that it's ringing bygone to my ears means that the "in modern lingo" bit is precarious. Is "bling" modern lingo? Is "phat?" What do you call slang that's defined by its cultural novelty but that then gets old? Tell me, daddy-O! How do you know when your term has slid from "modern lingo" into "erstwhile lingo"?
The worst part of the solve for me came at the end, in the NW, and here the tin-eared / awkward cluing really comes into play. I had JUN- and still no idea about JUNK E-MAIL because I the terms that humans use are "junk mail" or "spam" (1D: Target of some filters). JUNK E-MAIL is certainly a recognizable term, in that if you said it, people would know what you're talking about, but people actually *say* "junk mail" or "spam." The bigger problem here, though, was all the answers that JUNK EMAIL ran through, none of which I could figure out, two of which were cross-referenced in an unimaginably awkward way. So the idea, I guess, is that refugees from Vietnam came to ... the U.S.? ... via GUAM. But the wording on the 'NAM clue, my god (24A: Origin of many refugees once in 26-Across, for short). The "once in" was the confusing part. Does that mean "Who had once been in"? "Once they got to"? Also, 'NAM is not a thing people who did not serve there *ever* call Vietnam. Using it as a casual abbr. for a place name always feels wrong. 'NAM isn't just "for short." If you were planning a trip to southeast Asia, you wouldn't talk about going to 'NAM. It's Vietnam. But the bigger issue here is the clue phrasing, and the weird status of GUAM in all this. It's just such a clunky way to try to get a cross-reference going. And then to do that clunky cross-reference with abutting words!? Turned that whole area into a nightmare. Throw in the fact that ELIA was very hard  (34A: Man's name meaning "Jehovah is God") (it is a man's name, obviously, but I can name only one ... unless you count essayist Lamb's pseudonym, which I don't), and POKE was hard (17A: ___ fun), and I just got destroyed up there. Total freefall. Oh, and I wanted SANTIAGO for a bit too at 13D: Two-time host city of the FIFA World Cup (SAO PAULO). I had just the SA- and -O to go on for a bit—weird that those three letters sent me to a wrong answer that is so weirdly adjacent to the right answer (another soccer-loving South American city).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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