GS

@Lsm “re” pairs Pairs of the letters “re”

@Ms. Billie M. Spaight Those were two of the best answers, imho.

@Remy It bothered me too. Thank you. Our ability to shrug at the incredible suffering and death we impose on billions of animals every year is very sad.

@Pax Ahimsa Gethen Yup!!

@Dan Collins Thanks! My lack of sports knowledge is my biggest crossword weakness. (I wasn’t even sure if this was a sports thing or an advertising thing. Or some other meaning of pitcher I hadn’t thought of.)

@Jane Wheelaghan I think fern clue is based on the idea that ferns are easy to propagate. The “mom” here is the fern itself (mom to other ferns), not a human who owns a fern. Or so I assumed.

@Bruce To repeat myself, I think the “mom” here is not a human who loves plants, but the fern itself, because ferns are supposed to be easy to propagate, so they can be plant “moms” to many little ferns.

@Marty That just sounds like you’re being cranky. But to be fair, I don’t blame anyone for being extra cranky these days.

@Steve L So, it’s silly of people with a disease to be upset about being called a name that reduces their identity to just that disease? I never thought about it before, but it makes perfect sense to me. Would someone with diabetes like being called a diabeter? Why are some people so easily offended by new information?

@Francis Lol, nice

@pmom Both of them are quite famous (for very different things) - those were two of the first answers I knew on my first pass.

@Dave K. Pen can also be a verb and an enclosure, and probably more.