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@Jonathan For every rebus pair, the rebus is IE going one way and EI going the other way. It’s extremely clever.

@SP If someone asked you, “Do you lease this car or OWN it?,” would you find anything strange in that wording?

@Dan This spelling is plenty common in the US, especially with millennials and younger—I would say the majority of them use it now.

@B I didn’t find it especially easy. These things are very subjective.

@Hugh Why do you continue to do Sunday puzzles if you generally don’t like them? If I were you I’d make a list of stuff I really enjoy doing and do one of those things next Sunday instead.

@Mel Ok, I just went to the App Store and force updated the app and now I see the circles. But should we really have to check every day to make sure we have the latest version of the app before we solve? Ugh.

@Darren B I’ve never seen it spelled any other way than POSOLE. Maybe it’s a regional thing?

@Patrick Dobbins “BANG” is a substitute for the exclamation point, so “bang!” is redundant.

@Remy IN BUD works fine for me as a way to say “about to bloom” and DYE LOT, as knitters know, is definitely a number that appears on yarn labels. I agree CUTEY is not the most common way of spelling that word but it’s in the dictionary.

@Cat Lady Margaret It’s a very old term (I’m guessing 150-200 years at least) and people everywhere said a lot of things differently a long time ago.

@Marie I mean…it’s a word puzzle.

@Lena I didn’t read the clue as being about the grade you would receive in German class but as about the word you would learn in German class as meaning “a.”

@Elbridge Gerry Calling plays is literally exactly what REFS do.

@Darren This was one of my favorite puzzles in a long time. Nothing in here seemed nonsensical to me.

@Michael SHOHEIOHTANI is arcane?! He’s one of the current superstars of baseball! I know next to nothing and have no interest in the game and that was a gimme for me.

@Dawn In cryptic crosswords this is a very common abbreviation to indicate an anagram.

@dutchiris I went back to the puzzle four or five times over nearly 24 hours, as I'm well familiar with the phenomenon you describe from my several years of successfully completing NYT puzzles. And yes, I do believe that *eventually* I could have completed this one if I had cared to take the time out of my life it would have taken. But I had other things to do with my life that interested me more. (I also would like to emphasize that I am in no way saying this was a "bad" or "unfair" puzzle, just that it was so hard that I was unable to complete it in an amount of time that seemed reasonable to me to devote to it given my other priorities in life. That's fine. Nobody owes me a Saturday puzzle that I can complete in, say, less than an hour.)

@Bonnie The British imperial foot is not part of the metric system—it’s the same as our foot.

@James Both were gimmes for me, so, as usual, YMMV.

@D I bet if you google the phrase “friend material,” you will find that in fact a lot of people do use it.

@D You seem to have a lot of unearned confidence around language usage.

@Asher B. But this puzzle’s clues do lead to answers in standard English. I think there’s something you’re not understanding about it.

@Mean Old Lady Yes, Oscar was a grouch. And Bert was a curmudgeon.

@Sara It was “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” in Connecticut in the 70s.

@Dan I’m not sure what your point is, but mine is that “alright” is no longer really considered a misspelling or incorrect usage in the US. I see it in well-edited publications all the time.

@Paul I can’t tell from what you wrote if you know that that quotation is from Thoreau, not Shakespeare.

@Lpr ?? I and everyone I know in America also does kisses. You mean you put a string of Os at the end of your communication? Or am I reading this wrong?

@Shan Galileo, of course, did not speak English—what he is apocryphally supposed to have said in his version of Italian is “eppur si muove,” for which arguably either “and yet it moves” or “but still it moves” is a perfectly fine translation.

@Cherry It’s extremely common for me to have only a few answers filled in after one pass on Fridays and Saturdays, and I always finish. You just keep going through filling in a few more answers each time based on the crosses you have, maybe looking up some things, maybe clicking Check Puzzle if you’re feeling really bogged down. Maybe walk away at some point and let your subconscious work on things. Usually at some point you hit a tipping point and you’ll have enough filled in that the answers start to come easier. And then you finish! It’s easier than you think it will be at the point when you only have those three answers filled in.

@Michael What “use” do you think crossword puzzle themes should be put to?

@AySz88 You don’t think anything about “puzzles” should be…well…maybe a little puzzling? If everything about a puzzle is straightforward and obvious and unambiguous and it’s impossible to make a mistake, then what’s puzzling about it?

@SBK as with pretty much all rebuses, you only had to enter one of the numbers to get credit. I just had FOUR and NINE in my puzzle. My imagination sufficed to get the square roots.

@Barry Ancona ooh, I get to pick a nit not related to the puzzle! In Wisconsin, UW-M (or UWM) always refers to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The flagship campus in the capital is UW-Madison or just Madison.

@Robert And yet in the real world meanings do vary from person to person.

@Big Mike I agree it’s a great clue. It’s not original to Hemant or the NYT though—the semantic similarity of these two terms has been noted by many for a long time. For example, here’s a blog post about it from 2012: <a href="https://englishfromfriends.com/blog/2012/03/08/butt-dial-vs-booty-call" target="_blank">https://englishfromfriends.com/blog/2012/03/08/butt-dial-vs-booty-call</a>/

@BLT Took me a few minutes over my usual Friday time. These things are so individual, just depends on your personal wheelhouse and how in sync you are with the constructor’s mindset.

@The X-Phile I was in elementary school in the mid to late 70s (small-town New England) and the teacher still sent one or two of us out to the playground every afternoon to “do the erasers.” It was a coveted assignment, but then no one told us it was bad for our lungs.

@Leo It’s the constructor’s fault that you don’t know something?

@Mean Old Lady Baltic is the adjective, BALT the noun. It’s analogous to Slav and Slavic.

@Steve L I got the puzzle to look ok last night (after doing the whole thing in circle-less frustration) by force-updating the games app from the App Store. I suspect what happened is that your app automatically updated overnight, not that there was an overnight fix. (I don’t think the “pressing the puzzle” thing updates the entire app.)

@Cat Lady Margaret You don’t have to change your entire phone’s operating system language to Greek to add Greek as an available keyboard.

@SP I wish I could like your comment a hundred times and permanently pin it to the top of every comment section.