Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Tuesday, September 20, 2022, Rebecca Goldstein and Rachel Fabi

Today, we have a theme where a typical English phrase with one word repeated twice, then has the same word appended a third time, but with a different meaning. Thus 17A: Verbal disapproval of a boy king? (TUTTUTTUT) should be read as "Tut tut, King Tut!" Likewise the Chinese dog's food is a chow-chow's chow (CHOWCHOWCHOW). The consistency is excellent: in each case the original phrase comes first, followed by the additional instance. Mazda's catchphrase is "zoom zoom!" And the dance from the Moulin Rouge is the can-can.

I tried to come up with some of my own examples:

Say farewell to the tournament's number one seed: BYEBYEBYE.

And that's what I came up with. So pretty good set of choices the constructors used in the grid. Can you think of any others?

The best non-theme answer is at 39D: Tina Fey's "30 Rock" role (LIZLEMON). Love the show, love the character. It might be time to start watching the show again...


Nothing else grabbed me to any major degree. The answers are both smooth enough and gettable enough for a Tuesday. I would like some day to visit ARUBA (the B and C are Bonaire and CuraƧao). I enjoyed Haley CUOCO in The Flight Attendant, but have not yet watched season two.

62A: Put two and two together, e.g. (IDIOM) is an example of that kind of clue which unexpectedly goes to the general rather than the specific. I think these sorts of clues are very clever. Would they translate as well into other languages?

- Colum

2 comments:

  1. Express surprise at a water source? Agree with a Madagascar lemur? OK that's all I got (for now, ha ha)

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  2. Hey Philbo, have you heard the one about the three holes in the ground? ...

    Let's see... "Comforting phrase located across the room?" (there there there) ... "Kitchen prep on the double?" (chop chop chop)... ok, I'll stop now.

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