Jordan

Yet another unmarked rebus. I don't mind a rebus, but imagine someone attempting this crossword who never knew what they were; they would never have solved this puzzle. A rebus can be fun! But let's maybe try stepping out of our own bubble every now and again to help people who are newer to the hobby. They don't skip Thursdays because they're not smart enough to solve; they skip Thursdays because the expectation set by the puzzle is often opaque to them. Nobody in their right mind learns the regular pattern of a crossword, with one letter per square, and then thinks (unprompted by virtue of the lack of a marked square) "I bet I could get the right answer if I JAMmed another whole word into that square". Just mark your rebuses, y'all.

I continue my crusade against unmarked rebuses. This was a fun one, and clever without being cute about it or straying into the obtuse, and a very well-constructed puzzle! However, I still think that there should at least be an option for folks to toggle a setting that outlines rebus squares and explains what they are at the beginning of a puzzle where they are present, at the cost of a streak in the same way a checked square or word does now. A feature that explains the most opaque crossword convention to the uninitiated while being totally optional and preserving the integrity of a streak would strike a good middle ground, and would not be particularly difficult to write into the existing codebase. The result? Better solvers across the board, and more fun for everybody!

Eli means "ascent", not "high". This is, of course, when it isn't a diminutive for a theophoric name, as it often is.

SMILEYS is not an appropriate pluralization of SMILEY. That would be SMILIES

Yakitori is Japanese, not Chinese.