Sarcastic criticism / MON 8-30-21 / Mix of coffee and chocolate / Eggplant __ (cheesy dish, informally)

Word of the Day: RECTO (Right-hand page of a book) —

Recto is the "right" or "front" side and verso is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper (folium) in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. (Wikipedia)

Happy Monday! It's Megan again (the Renaissance poetry grad student from Boston), excited to be filling in for Rex a second time. I'm all set to start teaching again on Thursday, and I'm so ready to be back in the classroom (with masks, but in person) — especially now that the heat in Boston has died down a bit!

So today, we have a classic descending vowel puzzle. The five theme answers all begin with the same consonant sounds (here, a single syllable beginning with an "L" sound and ending with a "CKS" or "X" sound), but the vowel changes for each answer, and it changes in descending alphabetical order. It's a fairly old-fashioned kind of puzzle, which is absolutely fine — except when it LACKS HEART, as this one often DOES. My apologies in advance for the SNARK, but I'll try my best to MAKE NICE.

The theme answers (rather, their clues) just . . . aren't fun? LICKS THE SPOON has so much potential! It's a wonderful answer, but the clue just lays there, dead. "Finishes eating ice cream or soup, say." No joy. No baking cookies with a relative when you were little. None of that. Just an empty bowl. We also have two geographical locations (LEXINGTON and LUXEMBOURG) for the L_X themers, for some reason, and their clues ("Home of the University of Kentucky" and "Tiny neighbor of France") are bland. There have to be some other Lexington/Luxembourg fun facts floating around out there, just begging to be written into clues. When the puzzle format is this traditional, we need a little pizzazz, a little oomph, a little *jazz hand motion.* Just because it's a Monday doesn't mean the clues have to be . . . boring.

Finally — and this is remarkably nit-"picky" (har har), so feel free to disagree — LOCKSMITH stands out from the rest of the pack. It is a compound word: LOCK + SMITH. The "s" sound here belongs to the second part of the word, "smith," whereas in the rest of the theme answers, the "CKS" or "X" sound all comfortably land in the first word or in the first syllable. 

I found the fill to be rather challenging for a Monday, especially in the NE corner. BILOXI (3d: "Mississippi city on the Gulf of Mexico") was utterly unknown to me. (I looked it up, and it seems to have been hit pretty hard by Hurricane Ida. I hope everyone down there is safe. Take care of yourselves and watch out for one another.)

I was stumped on BILOXI, so I was absolutely confounded by AMORS. It seems obvious in retrospect, especially because those little troublemakers appear frequently in the poetry I study, but I've also rarely encountered it in the plural form. AMOR in the singular? Great. Got it. Standard crossword fare. But plural? I couldn't parse it. I also struggled with A TASTE (6d: "Barely any, as food or drink"). I don't buy the clue. The situation of the clue doesn't seem to really match the situation of the answer. The clue suggests lack; the answer suggests restrained decadence. No one says, "Oh wow, I'm starving, I've only had A TASTE to eat today." 

Two elegant long down answers: INTRICACY and FOOT MODEL. But again, the clues fell a little flat. I feel like you could come up with a fresh, Monday-level clue for FOOT MODEL other than: "One who might have a contract with a sandal manufacturer." I mean, yes, factually, it's true. But you've already gone ahead and made the decision to put FOOT MODEL in your puzzle. Don't give me a "contract"! Give me something fun!

I have never heard the term RECTO (see word of the day), which was pretty embarrassing for me, since I study old books for a living! If you knew it, kudos! And if you didn't, well, neither did I. But now we do, and we can share it with our geeky book friends. 

Otherwise, a lot of standard, un-flashy crosswordese: ALOE / OAR / EMT / POL / ELO / ELLE / LAPS / URI / ERIE / DISS / NAAN / ART / NERO. Happy to see two wonderful women, VANNA White and LAURA Dern. Icons, both of them. And I got a chuckle from the eastern section: BODY on top of TOE on top of SNAIL. Because what is a SNAIL, except for a hardshell BODY stacked on top of a big, squishy TOE? (Don't @ me, malacologists - I know there's a lot more to snails than that, and y'all are doing great work.)

Have a great Monday, everyone!

Signed, Megan Bowman, Crossword ABD

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