New York Times, Tuesday, April 16, 2019

I misspell SOBRIQUET all the time (for some reason, "sobrioquet" looks better). And now it turns out that I‘ve been mispronouncing it too. I was up in arms at first, because Bing's dictionary gives an audio, rhyming with "etiquette." But I think that's just Bing.

Zing! (Apologies to MSFT Bing! workers everywhere, who work so hard to make such an inferior product. Double zing!)

Google's dictionary pronounces it with an ending K sound — matching the written pronunciation in both dictionaries. Ahem. BING!!!

That's all a long way of saying that my early-week "Name that Theme" game took an unexpected turn. I guessed the theme in two themers. Then I hit my ridiculous SOBRIQUET tangent.

ARE YOU OKAY, Mary Kay? How about you, SIR KAY, from the Arthurian legends? How does it feel to be passed over by some guy named MURRAY THE K? If it helps, SPECIAL K and VITAMIN K are lodging similar protests.

I'd have been okay with just four themers, since 1.) the K rhymes get old pretty quick, and 2.) five themers strained the gridwork.

Now, I did like a lot of Gary's mid-length stuff. NEURONS / TAPIOCA, BEQUEST, NO SIREE, ATHEISM, all solid bonuses! RACE ME is a price to pay for that BEQUEST, but I like how it was clued, in a "race me" way that newbs could figure out.

Check out the south region though, where MURRAY THE K and ARE YOU OKAY overlap. Tough to find a four-letter entry that works in between them, and O SAY isn't great fill to begin with. Then, that forces RYANS, another dab of crossword glue. Top it off with ENE / SSW and I'd look to try a different grid layout.

Rhyming themes / different ways of spelling out a certain sound have been done so many times that it would have been great to do something fresher here. How about riffing on SPECIAL K — and having that K as the only K in the entire grid? Not sure how to clue that, but a twist like that could have raised the theme to a new level.