New York Times, Wednesday, August 17, 2022

"Pharaoh" is one of those words that I'm never totally sure how to spell, like "camaraderie," "occasion," and "hors d'ouevres." Hors d'oeurvres? Whatever.

In assembling my theme answers, I initially set out to find misspellings that occurred organically, like 39-Across, or Dan Quayle's "potatoe" (ask your parents, and then kindly see yourself off of my lawn). That didn't yield much, though, and while the rest of the themers are of the stylistic variety, I think they make for a much livelier set.

In other news — excluding a single Sunday puzzle, this is my fourth consecutive Wednesday puzzle. Nothing else, just Wednesdays. This hasn't been my intention, but evidently, I'm a Wednesday kind of constructor. Wednesday is also objectively the hardest day of the week to spell. Coincidence? Yes.

Special thanks go out to a 64-year-old registered nurse in a tiny central Missouri town, without whom this puzzle wouldn't have been possible.

Ah, those marketing folks and their splashy displays, replete with TOTES eye-catching intentional misspellings. May you be damned to a lifetime of taking my kids shopping—followed by ruler-slaps from their elementary school teachers who demand to know who taught them that FROOT is more correct (and tastier) than FRUIT.

I spent an embarrassingly long stretch wondering what was wrong with BOSTON RED SOX. Besides the fact that they're dirty rotten cheaters, of course. The word cox comes to mind. Referring to the cox of the boat who spearheaded the foul play, of course!

I appreciated that Michael drew from various areas: food, baseball, horse racing, video games, music. Melancholy reminder that marketers are everywhere. Incredibly evocative brands / names, too — I'd be happy to see any of them in a themeless.

The MORTAL KOMBAT / ALEK crossing fascinated me. What a genius idea: potentially ambiguous crossings made unambiguous by the theme. Without today's SIC concept, I would have had to guess at ALEC or ALEK. I would have loved five crossings like this.

That nugget sparked my interest more than the loose collection of purposeful misspellings since you could list hundreds of them. I would have loved some form of tightening, like in a 2015 puzzle based around music.

The final Across entry is an optimal place for a revealer, delaying the curtain until the last moment. It's not as crucial in today's case since you're already cross-referencing to it, so it might have been better to move it up one row for cleaner filling of that PEI DREI corner. Or you could move FROOT LOOPS to the last themer position and orient SIC vertically off its S.

Still, I enjoyed the assortment of vivid names, as well as the societal statement about marketing placing its sic-ly fingerprints over all walks of life.