Constructor: Christina Iverson
Relative difficulty: Medium (my time was more Medium-Challenging, but I was ridiculously, probably anomalously slow to start) (7:45)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: QUIET QUITTING (32A: Trend for unengaged employees) —
Lots of delightful stuff here (particularly "IS THAT A THING?" and A LOT TO UNPACK), but there's one answer that feels fatally ... off ... and it's one that held me up a ton, which of course makes me resentful. I don't think I have ever seen the word HIERARCHAL. I have seen a word that resembles it, a fairly common word. But that word has two extra letters. That word—is HIERARCHICAL:
HIERARCHAL isn't even offered as a variant. Here's what happens when I google [HIERARCHAL]:
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Yes, I did mean HIERARCHICAL. Thank you, search engine. I have no doubt that some dictionary somewhere has this spelling as "valid," but HIERARCHAL feels ... bad. Like, really bad. To my ears. It looks like a typo, or like someone trying to use a big word and botching it. This is a Wordlist Word par excellence. As such, could all you constructors please scrub it from your lists? It sucks. And not in the good, STRAW-like way (15D: Suck it!).
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Relative difficulty: Medium (my time was more Medium-Challenging, but I was ridiculously, probably anomalously slow to start) (7:45)
Word of the Day: QUIET QUITTING (32A: Trend for unengaged employees) —
Quiet quitting has been framed in different ways by different pundits, but it essentially boils down to doing only the required tasks associated with one’s job and not going “above and beyond” one’s job description. In other words, it is the middle ground between underperforming and overperforming. // Culturally, it is seen as a rejection of the hustle-culture mentality that has long been associated with career success and corporate ladder-climbing. In a functional sense, from an employee standpoint, it means not allowing more of one’s labor to be extracted by an employer than they are paying for. // However you spin it, quiet quitting seems to be a real phenomenon—and one that’s not going anywhere any time soon. In fact, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, more than half of American workers qualified as “quiet quitters.” (thestreet.com)
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| [merriam-webster.com] |
I struggled to get any kind of foothold today. Or, rather, I got a very solid foothold pretty quickly—the whole 3x5 section in the far NW, plus EMIR, locked in quickly—but then spun my wheels. Hard. In retrospect, if I'd just put in STAR at ---R (4D: Lead), my sense of the puzzle's difficulty would likely have been Quite different. I don't blame myself for not seeing FLUTE SOLO (hard clue!) (14A: Wind up alone?), but dang I should've guessed TARANTULA from the TAR-, and would almost certainly have guessed it from TARA-. I think I would've got ALL SMILES from ALL S-, but with just ALL in place, [Beaming] just wasn't getting me there. So I had to abandon the NW, and that was awful. Couldn't get any of the short stuff I looked at. VAT? TUB? VAT? TUB? Bah! (24A: Big container). There's a reason I proceed off of crosses exclusively (if I can) and don't jump around the grid, or solve Across answers sequentially, or some of the other things I've heard of other solvers doing. I build on what I have. Diving into a section where I have nothing in place, esp. on Fridays and Saturdays, can feel horrible and hopeless. My brain went dry. I couldn't even get a mental image of PLOW pose, a pose I've been in plenty in my life (25A: Yoga pose with arms extended and legs folded over the head) (you're on your back to begin this one, which is how you got your legs "over the head," LOL). Floundering, I was. Then somehow I tried SAILS BY, which led to TINY and TITO and UFO etc. And then I was in business. But it's possible I lost a full minute+ at the beginning just blundering around.
I'd heard of QUIET QUITTING, so that was fortunate. It's a fairly recent coinage—so recent that [define QUIET QUITTING] doesn't get you anything very concise or good in the way of definitions, and most of those are from "business" sites fretting about What's To Be Done With Workers These Days. These sites talk about workers refusing to go "the extra mile" or "above and beyond," which, honestly ... you deserve to have workers quiet-quit on you if you speak in stupid clichés like that. There are reasons I have aversion to "business" culture and language abuse is right up there (treating human beings like "costs" that need to be kept down is another). Anyway, I got the answer easily, though I think the use of "unengaged" is really ambiguous here. That word seems to have come from a Gallup poll, discussing whether workers are "engaged" at work, i.e. really into their jobs. But to "engage" someone is to "hire" them, so "unengaged employees," out of context, is hard to comprehend. "Why would there be a 'trend' for employees who aren't planning to marry!?" I can imagine someone wondering. Plus, the "trend" *is* the disengagement. QUIET QUITTING = disengaging from uncompensated parts of your job, disengaging from the "hustle culture" businesses expect but don't adequately reward. The clue makes it sound like people are QUIET QUITTINGas a result of disengagement. As if people are just kinda bored with their jobs, as opposed to actively resisting a part of work culture that sucks (and not in the good, STRAW-like way).
Too many clues today were proper nounified. Three (!) different clues featured titles with missing words. MEN (5D: "___ Explain Things to Me," influential 2014 essay collection by Rebecca Solnit). PIES (39A: Stephen Sondheim's "The Worst ___ in London"). LOUIS (7D: "___ and the Good Book" (1958 jazz album)). I guess LOUIS would've been a proper noun whatever you did, but still, it was irksome to see this same clue type trotted out over and over. Trivializes (as in, turns to trivia) an answer that might otherwise have a clever, and much more generally accessible, clue. Had to wait on the second "A" in BATARANGS, and since that "A" was in the absolute non-word HIERARCHAL, I was waiting A While. Never ever heard of PANAY, so that "P" was the last letter into the grid (44D Philippine island that's home to Iloilo). Thank god for bat PUPs, though ... not sure you should really have "bat" in the clues when you've got BAT(ARANGS) in the grid. Speaking of dupes: again today the puzzle decided to do the stupid duplicate clue thing (with the last two Downs: [Place for a ring] => LOBE, TOE). This time, neither clue feels tortured for its answer, so no harm done. Also, I never even saw the TOE clue. The SE and SW were much easier for me than the top half of the grid.
Notes:
- 43A: Invention originally used as a yellow dye, in brief (TNT)— first of all, no idea. Second of all, do you really need the "in brief" for TNT? Some things are known exclusively by their shortened forms, and TNT is one of them.
- 47A: The Traveling Wilburys or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (SUPERGROUP) — wow they went back in time for this clue. Was the term SUPERGROUP even operative back when CSNY was a thing? Would've been nice to see something more modern, like boygenius, here.
- 14A: Wind up alone? (FLUTE SOLO) — nice. At first I was mad that the "up" seemed to have no purpose here, but then I thought "maybe that has to do with the range of the instrument," i.e. the fact that the flute plays in a higher register than other "winds" (like the clarinet). So, "up," great.
- 37A: Hall mate? (OATES)— LOL, Not Anymore ("Daryl Hall Gets Restraining Order Against John Oates in Hall & Oates Legal Battle")
- 27A: Where a flask might be kept (LAB) — if you got LAB easily here and never considered HIP, we are Very different people.
P.S. While I was spellchecking / grammarchecking this write-up ...
