Sound unit found in many Asian languages / SUN 3-31-24 / Final phase of a video game, perhaps / Toy brand for a budding engineer, maybe / With "the," a sudden flip from attraction to disgust, in modern parlance / Its water is nearly 10 times saltier than ocean water / Police captain in "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" / Sibilant summons

Constructor: Spencer Leach

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Turns of Phrase"— familiar phrases (following a "___ THE ___" pattern) have their first and last parts switched *and* (most of the time?) changed to homophones, creating ... yes, wackiness:

Theme answers:

• ALARM THE RAISE (22A: Spook some creatures in an aquarium's tank?)
• DAZE THE COUNT (33A: Deliver a blow to Dracula?)
• CITES THE SEE (47A: References a Vatican Library source?)
• SCREWS THE TITANS (60A: Referees a Tennessee football game poorly?)
• HONOR THE DEW (79A: Write an ode to a caffeinated soda?)
• HEAT THE BEETS (90A: Start preparing borscht?)
• PRESS THE MEAT (104A: Make smash burgers?)

Word of the Day: TONEME (84A: Sound unit found in many Asian languages) —

A phoneme in a language that uses different tones for different meanings. (wiktionary) //  [PHONEME: "any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat." (google / Oxford languages)]

For a puzzle that seems to want desperately for you to see it as youthful (the Taylor Swift lyrics and the YEETing and whatever that clue on ICK is, etc.), the theme is remarkably basic and corny and last-century. The puns are sometimes funny, sometimes not, mostly ho-hum, definitely old-fashioned. It's not showing anything terribly inventive or interesting, and if you look too hard at the theme, it starts to unravel a bit. I mean, you have to understand the parameters very loosely. It's really just a sound change thing. Sometimes the spellings of words change, sometimes they don't, sometimes the meanings change drastically, sometimes you just change a noun into its related verb (i.e HEAT into HEAT). You always change the spelling of the last word (except with SEE ... and COUNT ... where just the meanings are changed), but you never change the spelling of the first word (except with DAZE ... and CITES ...). It all works best if you don't really look at the grid, but just *say* the new ("turned") phrase: "raise the alarm" => "ALARM THE RAYS." Perfect. Textbook wackiness of the aural kind. Taken at that level, the themers all work ... exceptHONOR THE DEW—the phrase is not "do the honor," but "do the honors," plural. You might "do someone the honor of" something, but as a standalone phrase (which is what we're doing here), it's "do the honors." HONORS THE DEW would've worked perfectly ... but it's HONOR THE DEW because that's what fit in the allotted grid space. Symmetry is a harsh mistress, it's true, but if the *correct* version of your themer doesn't fit, it doesn't fit, and you should find something else. Of course the grid could've been built with CITES THE SEES (plural) and HONORS THE DEW as a symmetrical pair. But it wasn't. If this puzzle were full of wonder and delight and genuine humor, I wouldn't be noticing this relatively trivial defect. But the theme is just OK, so I notice. Greatness excuses unevenness. Without greatness, though ... leeway retracted.