Amazon speakers introduced in 2014 / MON 2-28-22 / Hometown proud supermarket / Francis of old TV's "What's My Line?" / 1990s cartoon series featuring Yakko Wakko and Dot / Baby-boomer series that starred Ken Olin

Constructor: Zach Sherwin and Andrea Carla Michaels

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium 

THEME: honestly, I have no IDEA — looks like the first three letters of each theme answer ... repeat ... somewhere else in that answer ... is that really it??? The letters don't ... do anything or mean anything or ... anything? Wow, OK:

Theme answers:

• OKEFENOKEE (18A: Swamp in "Pogo")
• "ANIMANIACS" (24A: 1990s cartoon series featuring Yakko, Wakko and Dot)
• "THIRTYSOMETHING" (39A: Baby-boomer series that starred Ken Olin)
• WORDSWORTH (55A: Poet William who wrote "The Prelude")
• CHINCHILLA (63A: South American rodent with soft, dense fur)

Word of the Day: Jeannette RANKIN (40D: Jeannette ___ first woman elected to Congress) —

Jeannette Pickering Rankin (June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973) was an American politician and women's rights advocate, and the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Montana in 1916, and again in 1940. As of 2022, Rankin is still the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana.

Each of Rankin's Congressional terms coincided with initiation of U.S. military intervention in the two World Wars. A lifelong pacifist, she was one of 50 House members who opposed the declaration of war on Germany in 1917. In 1941, she was the only member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A suffragist during the Progressive Era, Rankin organized and lobbied for legislation enfranchising women in several states including Montana, New York, and North Dakota. While in Congress, she introduced legislation that eventually became the 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting unrestricted voting rights to women nationwide. She championed a multitude of diverse women's rights and civil rights causes throughout a career that spanned more than six decades. (wikipedia)

It's not uncommon for me to find the Monday puzzle a little dull, or a little corny, but it is nearly unheard of for me to find it completely thematically inscrutable. I simply have no idea what the theme is supposed to be. If the full extent of the theme is simply "the first three letters of each answer repeat themselves within the answer," then I haven't seen a theme so startlingly unworthy of publication in a long, long time. There's no wordplay ... the repeated three-letter strings don't make words, or sounds, or ... anything. They Don't Do Anything. In each case, there are just three random letters ... that then repeat. Is that ... unusual? Strange? It seems so ordinary, so banal, that I can't imagine anyone's ever thinking it would amount to theme material, and I really Really can't imagine an editor's thinking "yes! I get a hundred submissions a week but this! This is the one." What in the world is happening? Maybe, maybe if there had been a revealer, some snappy concept, something that would make the repeated letter strings make any kind of sense, then the concept would've been tolerable—good revealers often turn seemingly unremarkable answers into a really tight and interesting set. But this ... what is this? I pity the Monday-level puzzles that were rejected to make room for this one. I don't normally read the other blogs, but since my friend Rachel writes for NYT's own "Wordplay" blog on Monday, I thought I'd jump over there and at least make sure I wasn't missing anything ... and I was not. Also, she didn't "get" the theme either—this is telling. I did enjoy reacquainting myself with Jeannette RANKIN, but the pleasure pretty much started and ended there.