Rose
ATL
ATL
@Michael Gaobest ETA is a Greek letter that is one of four that rhyme with each other, the other three are beta, zeta, and theta.
I got the schtick of the puzzle very quickly since I tend to run the first few rows of across clues and then switch to downs, and so on, but there were a couple quadrants where the fill took me a bit to finish, even with that knowledge.
VESTS took me a sec but it’ll help if you realize they’re fleece or puffer vests, not the kind in a 3 piece suit!
Was "For the record, I think 58A would be an exceptional Final Jeopardy question" meant to be tongue-in-cheek? Because they have used a similar clue, Final Jeopardy Monday, December 13, 2010, in category COUNTRIES: "In only 2 cases can you add 2 letters to one country & get another country: Austria/Australia & this pair" though they later acknowledged there was one more that would have been accepted that didn't come up, Mali/Malawi. Obviously the one in this puzzle is the only one that fits the restriction of the final 2 letters, still fun!
@Grant yeah the OMG in the clue is what made me think SAMESIES pretty quickly but I guess I’m just the right demographic to have samesies in my vocabulary even if I would only use it sort of jokingly.
@Frankie B I grew up in the US and the first person I ever heard use it that way was my boss from India, and I was so confused at first! I’ve encountered it a few times since (including in a crossword) but he’s still the main person I’ve heard use it that way.
@Erin yes this was really fun! The theme actually became apparent to me relatively quickly and I solved it in about half my average time for Thursday, and without help either, high five us!
@Steve Daniel I think it's correct, crossword clues like this can be tricky with no context, but it made me think of the biblical phrase, "he rent his clothes" = "he tore his clothes"
@Alex I was also bending over backwards to figure out why PROST didn't fit there as that's the form I've generally heard as well. I found this <a href="https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/27187/what-is-the-difference-between-prost-and-prosit" target="_blank">https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/27187/what-is-the-difference-between-prost-and-prosit</a>
@Jon that’s one clue I managed to work out myself pretty early in my solve, though I wasn’t 100% sure until the acrosses started to fit
@Jim in my experience Ser is only found in George R. R. Martin’s books and there it’s only used for knights, but it really had me wondering because I’d never seen bocce spelled with an i, but after changing it I got the puzzle right and found the Wikipedia that said bocci was a variant, who knew!
@Jerod pretty straightforward use of this definition I thought <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20nub" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20nub</a>
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