Constructor: Christopher Youngs
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: I, um, don't really know— looks like "-IUM" has been added to familiar phrases to create wacky phrases. Why, I don't know. But there it is:
Theme answers:
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There's only one thing I'll remember about this puzzle, if I remember anything, and that's that I default to -ER spellings over -OR spellings (at the ends of nouns) if I'm not entirely sure. And now I'll remember that my "wrong" answer today (IMPOSTERS instead of IMPOSTORS) was not, technically, wrong. Attestations for that spelling are all over the place, and all over the globe. But my answer was "wrong" for this puzzle, since DECOMPILE is (apparently) a word, and DECEMPILE is nonsense, only if you clue that word as some coding jargon, I'm not *exactly* sure how I'm supposed to know that the nonsense is nonsense. Mostly I'm just struggling to understand why you'd burn one of your long Downs on a word as phenomenally boring as DECOMPILE (11D: Convert into a higher-level language, as computer code). I gotta believe that even if you *knew* that word, you were like "oh, I know this! ... yeah, still boring." This grid is desperate, starved for entertainment, starved for interesting fill or genuine pleasure of any sort. Typically, the long Downs (in an Across-oriented theme puzzle) are places to throw down some sparkly fill to add to solving pleasure or at least to make up for a dull theme. But here, we get DECOMPILE and EPIDERMIS. I don't mind the latter, but you wouldn't call either of them gems, and man this theme needed gems—a passel of gems to make up for an inexplicably flat theme. Why -IUM? I still don't see it. Even if there had been some kind wordplay revealer, you're still left with a set of wacky theme answers without a laugher in the bunch. CRANIUM APPLE comes close; you definitely get the most mileage from your -IUM with that one. But the first one, PODIUM CAST, just falls flat—not a great way to open. MEDIUM SCHOOL doesn't pick things up much. By the time I got to TEDIUM TALK I just wanted it to be over. I had the TEDIUM part and thought "which TED is this? Knight? Danson? Oh, TALK, great, thank god that's over."
Relative difficulty: Easy
Theme answers:
- PODIUM CAST (17A: Group of winners at a film awards show?) (podcast)
- CRANIUM APPLE (27A: Target for William Tell?) (Cran-Apple)
- MEDIUM SCHOOL (46A: Where séance leaders get their degrees?) (med school)
- TEDIUM TALK (62A: Lo-o-ong lecture from a parent?) (Ted Talk)
The noun referring to one who takes an assumed identity in order to deceive is variously spelled imposter and impostor. Impostor has the edge, and it is the form recommended by most English reference sources, but imposter is not wrong. Not only is it nearly as common as impostor, but it is also nearly as old. Impostor came to English from the French imposteur in the late 16th century, and imposter first appeared almost immediately thereafter. And though the -or spelling has always been more common, imposter has always been present to some degree. // In fact, imposter is more common than impostor in some areas of English. In a search covering a few dozen of the most popular blogs in the English-speaking world, for instance, the ratio of imposter to impostor is about 6:5. Imposter is also a little more common than impostor in 21st-century Australian and New Zealand news publications that make content available online. The two forms are neck and neck in British and American news publications from this century. Meanwhile, in a Google Books search—which covers millions [of] books, journals, and magazines—limited to 2000 to the present, impostor remains about three times more common than imposter. (grammarist.com) (emph. mine)
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The grid is absolutely teeming with 3- 4- and 5-letter fill of the commonest variety, which makes it hard to know what to talk about besides how uninteresting it all is. SCRIMSHAW is about the sassiest, liveliest thing here today (54A: Art of bone carving). The short stuff isn't horrendous, just, well, to reuse a word I've used a lot already today, flat. I won't bother listing it all out; you can just look at the grid and see for yourself. If the theme had been a sizzler or even if the longer answers had been winners, all the repeaters that populate the bulk of the grid wouldn't be nearly so disappointing, or even noticeable. Short fill can be familiar and merely adequate if the marquee stuff really shines. Today, it did not.
["See, EPIDERMIS means your hair ..."]
Notes:
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- 6D: One-named ancient satirist ... or a Pokémon character (LUCIAN) — choose your fighter, I guess. The second half of this clue is depressing to me. A sad, random afterthought that I guess is supposed to act as a bone to ... some class of solver, I don't know. Or maybe it's the puzzle's one very weak attempt to be "current" (never mind that Pokémon is old by now). Anyway, LUCIAN is rolling over in his non-Pokémon grave, and I sympathize with him. "Everything that is known about Lucian's life comes from his own writings, which are often difficult to interpret because of his extensive use of sarcasm." (wikipedia). A writer after my own heart.
- 14A: Monopoly token replaced by a cat in 2013 (IRON)— I love cats, as you likely know and/or are tired of hearing about by now, but the IRON was a great token and I miss it. That is, I miss it theoretically. Monopoly is a soul-crushingly dull game that I haven't played in decades, so I don't miss it miss it.
- 49A: Unfinished crusade of the 1970s in brief (ERA)— Equal Rights Amendment. The first version was introduced in Congress in 1923.
- 19A: Reminder of a past injury (SCAR)— here's how to know if the answer to a clue like this is SCAR or SCAB: ... it's just SCAR. "R" is a more common letter, so guess "R." Also, a SCAB will be fresher, so it'll probably have a neutral "wound covering"-type clue, whereas SCAR is likely to be clued in reference to the "past." But again, just guess "R." There are way, way more appearances of SCAR, and anyway half the SCAB clues refer to strikebreakers.
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