Peter

@Andrzej I also, having been a native English speaker my whole life, have never heard of the word KNURL. Same goes for ASYLA and ARDENCY, although I can at least see how they relate to their more familiar forms, asylum and ardent

@Eddie I feel obligated to come to the constructor’s defense on this matter. When I was solving this puzzle the thought never even crossed my mind that it might be filled with too many esoteric Americanisms. A lot of the comments make it sound as if this should have been blatantly obvious to the constructor. This criticism seems a bit extreme to me

@Andrzej It’s obvious to everybody that Big Ben is the name of the tower, even if it’s not actually true

@Andrzej Full time employees in the US get about 8 sick days per year on average. Some companies even pool the sick days and the vacation days together, and say use them as you will! What a concept! We can’t have those sneaky employees using their sick days when they just want the day off. Not to mention the culture surrounding sick days: toughing it out and going to work when you are sick is actually seen as virtuous by many people here! It’s a reality that really makes you want to barf 🤢 🤮

@Andrzej In the US, “same-sex” and “opposite-sex” are terms commonly used to describe relationships. I guess the clue is just wordplay based around this terminology

@James While I don’t think it should have been rejected, I must say there were a lot of rough naticks for me in this one: POSOLE crossing LOIRE EMIL crossing both AMARO and SHTETL GEHRY crossing SER I was very surprised when I got the gold star without a single message about horsefeathers or aw shucks. I guess I am getting better at making educated guesses when it comes to naticky squares. In the past I might have been stuck for good, hopelessly trying different combinations of letters.

@Cat Lady Margaret If I tried to play the drums on my cat’s belly, she’d probably play the piano on my eyeballs

@Roberta I’ve heard 40 HOURS of sick leave is required at a minimum, but I’ve never met someone who got 40 DAYS here

@Henry Su In this instance, [Have legs] and LAST are both verbs, whereas “fast” would be an adjective, so it does not fit as an answer to the clue

@Andrzej We should be grateful to be informed that any opinion or constructive criticism we might have is ackshually factually incorrect

@Pani Korunova It’s also a millennial slang term used in the sense: “There was a bunch of news camera crews posted up outside the courthouse, waiting for the police to arrive with the suspect.”

@Helen Wright Every circled letter gets used twice, so going up would give you TSE and then going back down would give you EST

@Andrzej I can understand a foreign language clue when there’s no other way to clue the fill, but in this case clueing POPO as “Fuzz” or “Five-O” could have worked just fine

@Marie It means hopelessly going over and over a completely filled puzzle trying to figure out which square(s) might be the one(s) that contain a wrong letter

@Nora LOL! Thank you so much for quoting that paragraph here

@RichardZ Even if you aren’t familiar with this catchphrase, it should be easy enough to infer the answer from the rest of the quotation. In a puzzle filled with obscure proper nouns, this commonplace verb was the least of my worries

@Brandon If you want to try some simpler Saturday puzzles, the past few weeks have been on the easier side. Today’s was definitely not easy

@Laura “Left on read” is a modern phrase generally used to imply that the recipient of a text read it (which the sender knows because they received a read receipt) but they intentionally chose not to respond

@Andrew F WITHER is a common synonym for wilt, and the idiom “wilt under pressure” is similar to the clue

@Jackson You’re not alone — I’m surprised so many are calling this one easy. I thought there was lots of tricky clues and very few gimmes. I felt stumped from start to finish, but was able to make steady enough progress, getting lucky with some early leaps of faith, and came in a smidge under my average. I consider this to be the quality of a perfect Friday puzzle

@B Lies can be problems because the person telling the lies must keep track of all the details they have made up if they do not want to be caught. Also lying is generally a bad thing to do, so lies can be problems from a moral perspective

@Pani Korunova That is one of my most dreaded crossword situations to find myself in — getting the “horsefeathers” message on a rebus puzzle and having to decide whether I should be trying to format the rebus squares differently or flyspecking for errors elsewhere in the puzzle

@Vaer Cluing BOROUGH as [One of 32 in London] on the 4th of July?! Is Joel Fagliano a redcoat spy?

@Ιασων [41, to 43] was extremely cryptic even for someone from the U.S.

@Andrzej MEN ON could mean one on, two on, or bases loaded. The eg in the clue indicates that bases loaded is just one particular example of MEN ON. I missed this eg when I was solving — it wasn’t until I read Steve L’s comment that I realized my mistake

@James Wow I think you are right. That might be the first time I’ve seen a genuinely unchecked square in one of these crosswords. Usually the squares that seem unchecked at first glance are actually checked by a layer of the theme, but those 8 squares in this puzzle are truly unchecked

@Lauchlin Yes I think you are right. A rebus puzzle, with several of the squares containing a “hole” rebus and one containing a “mole” rebus. Sometime in the last year and a half I believe, as that is when I started solving the NYT crossword regularly

@Andrzej I hear it used often enough, usually in a somewhat facetious manner

@Ιασων Since nobody else has answered your question yet: the Montreal Expos were an MLB franchise that relocated to Washington DC back in the early 2000s and changed their name to the Washington Nationals

@Andrzej I doubt many people here were familiar with the word IDIOLECTS - even as a native English speaker, I certainly wasn’t. But it seemed correct to me because I was thinking of it as a portmanteau of the the words idiosyncratic and dialect

@Andrzej Amazing! It feels to me like a shift to that sort of mindset over here will never happen…

@Lewis I feel like the -ion endings are really pulling a lot of weight here. Although CONFUSEPROFUSE might not be workable, I’m sure someone here could come up with a good clue for CONFUSIONPROFUSION

@Steven M. I used to think something similar when I would solve crosswords high on meth. But these days I’m inclined to believe there is no positive correlation between substance use and crossword performance. We owe our success to the skills we have cultivated from the work we put in