Chinese tree with fan-shaped leaves / MON 1-20-20 / 1984 language / Strive for epic effect / Back-and-forth changes to wikipedia page / Kind of wagon for pioneers / Deceived with fake-out in hockey / Ride for Quidditch player

Constructor: Evan Kalish

Relative difficulty: Medium (3:05)

THEME: GET THE PICTURE (56A: Comprehend ... or what 20-, 29- and 47-Across do, finally)— "final" word of each themer is another word for "picture"

Word of the Day: NEWSPEAK (40D: "1984" language) —

Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state and the setting of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak,  a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, free will — that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrime, as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy. (wikipedia)

This one left me cold. The theme concept is just a tad too basic, the revealer doesn't quite stick the landing, the theme answers themselves aren't that snappy as stand-alone answers, and the fill was fussy—oddly old-fashioned despite one showy attempt at currency (EDIT WAR, which, to be fair, *is* probably the most interesting thing in the grid) (43D: Back-and-forth changes to a Wikipedia page). I actually found the puzzle tough for a Monday, which is why I was startled to see the clock at just 3:05 when I was done. If that's on the high side of average, it's only just so—maybe by 10 seconds. I feel like I lost almost all those seconds at the very beginning, when GOBIG and GUSSY proved strangely elusive. Both of those answers are unusual, which is fine, but they kept me from getting a quick early toehold. Rest of that corner is kind of depressingly crossword-common: UMAMI, OMANI (first answer), YIN, IMAC. There's a stodginess to BATIN (I generally hear commentators talk about "driving" or "knocking" in runs, though I'm not disputing BATIN's validity). Then there's ERMA (again) and DRE and AWOL and EEYORE etc. It all just felt a little limp. And then the revealer was, finally, a let-down. The thing that really put me off, the thing that made me lose most of my goodwill toward this admittedly OK, not-terrible effort, was the ostentatious Scrabblef*ing with those damn "J"s. PBJ, LBJ ... when you gotta go to initials, the "J"s are not actually adding value, and the fact that you keep shoving high-value Scrabble tiles in there with no added value just doesn't speak well of the overall decision-making. You're just cramming them into corners for, I don't know decorative reasons? At least the "X" that got shoved in the NE doesn't really mar things. I dunno. I react very badly to the "ooh, watch me pull a "J" out of my hat" act. Just make the overall grid unstuffy and nice, it's really all I ask on a Monday. "J" shmay.


Here are the things that gave me (a little) trouble:

• 6A: Poker or snooker (GAME)— those two things felt close enough to each other that I really Really thought the answer would be something specific, not just (wah Wah, sad trombone!) GAME. Bathetic!
• 19A: Black gem with bands (ONYX)— my eyes saw "gem," I had the "O," I wrote in ... OPAL. That is, as they say, my bad.
• 29D: A diamond that has one is moderately expensive (CARAT)— I had the "C" but I still had to read this clue several times to understand the grammar ... it's really long, and you don't see complete sentence clues very often, so it's not that this clue was hard, just that it was weird.
• 32A: Mate for mama (PAPA)— had the final "A" but was not entirely confident it wasn't DADA, so had to wait for crosses to make it clear.
• 62A: Computer cable (WIRE) — had the "R" and only the "R" in place and so wrote in CORD—easily the worst mistake (in terms of time cost) that I made during the solve—unless you count "completely forgetting nearly everything about '1984' including NEWSPEAK" as a mistake, in which case *that* was the worst (40D: "1984" language).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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