Order for a birthday party or wedding reception / TUE 12-13-2022 / Ways to escape a dilemma / Ab-toning exercise / Words after get or sleep / Leftover morsel

Word of the Day: PINYIN (44A: Chinese transliteration system) —

Hanyu Pinyin (simplified Chinese: 汉语拼音; traditional Chinese: 漢語拼音; pinyin: hànyǔ pīnyīn), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese form, to learners already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, but pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written in the Latin script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The word Hànyǔ (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語) literally means "Han language" (i.e. Chinese language), while Pīnyīn (拼音) means "spelled sounds".^[1]

Hello hello! It's Rafa here filling in for Rex Parker. Sometimes when I finish solving a puzzle I think: This puzzle was great, but it wasn't for me! This puzzle as very much in that category! When I finished solving, I couldn't quite figure out what the theme was so I googled the theme answers and realized they were all flowers. Aha! The fact that I knew 0/4 of these flowers says a lot more about me than about the puzzle, but unfortunately it did make it so the theme didn't feel quite satisfying during the solve. I wonder if I'm a flower-illiterate odd-one-out, or whether this theme eluded others too ... let me know in the comments!

As for the theme clues, they felt like a bit of a mixed bag to me. WOLF'S BANE was my favorite -- fun and evocative and just the right amount of wacky. BABY'S BREATH felt a bit weaker because it seems like "baby's breath" could quite plausibly be a phrase used to describe ... a baby's breath. So the wackiness didn't land as nicely.

Luckily, though, there was plenty of other fun stuff in the grid: HOUSE PARTY, EVIL GENIUS, PAST LIFE, PINYIN, etc. I appreciated the clue echo on RAGER and HOUSE PARTY, as well as the fun trivia in the clue for ANTEATER. The fill was mostly clean but there were a few dings like SHER, NEHI, CIRRI. (I have only ever seen or heard of NEHI in crossword puzzles and just found on 30 seconds ago it's pronounced "knee high" -- FYI if that's also news to you.)  A"ding" in the fill is subjective thing, but one metric I like to use when thinking about fill for early-week puzzles is: Is this something solvers would reasonably have encountered outside of crossword puzzles? Of course, we all live wonderfully diverse lives, but have any of you had a conversation about CIRRI clouds?

Not much else to say about this one! Nice and mostly smooth early-week debut.