Sunday, July 9 2023, Christina Iverson

Hello hello!  It's Philbo again, surfacing after a very busy three weeks - busy enough that I even fell behind on the NYT crosswords, something that rarely happens.  But here I am, with an amusing and fairly gentle Sunday puzzle to report on.  Today's theme was given away by the title - "A Thousand Words" - and was also evident in the clues themselves, with seven Across clues represented by pictures (get it?  Of course you do 🙂 )  The trick is, each of the seven answers is a punny representation of its pictured clue, as well as being a phrase in and of itself.  Can you believe - it took me about 15 minutes to come up with this entirely inadequate description of what's going on?  Perhaps a few of my favourites as examples:

SPORTSILLUSTRATED - an illustration of a tennis player beside a golf player

LEGALREPRESENTATION - a drawing ("representation") of a gavel beside a set of scales

SPITTINGIMAGE - an image of a person mid-expectoration

At this point I'm sure you get the PICTURE!  As I mention often, I usually ignore the themes in these puzzles, to make it a bit more challenging and also for the enjoyment of it revealing itself toward the end, but today's was pretty obvious so I really sped straight down the grid.   There was much to smile at; e.g. "File a Led Zep album under Z, say" (MISSORT), "Grp. going over the falls?" (OSHA - took a while to "get" this one), and "Soul proprietor" (KIA - cute!)  Also clever, but my downfall today, was "Ones holding hands?" (ULNAE).  This was just about my LOI and I entered it as ULNAS, which led to a FWOE and ruined/invalidated my speedy 11:16.

One old crosswording chestnut made an appearance - EKES ("Squeezes (out)").  Does anybody honestly know the real definition of this word?  Isn't it "supplement"?  And who ever uses EKE in common parlance?  

So - lots of fun today!  Hope you enjoyed it too.

-philbo