Fri., 11/28 Mike Peluso

[magus]

THEME:   national products with the last word changed to its homonym
   
GOOD ONES:    
Yoko Ono, in spirit   JAPANESE BEATLE [beetle]   
Place for sweaters?  SAUNA   
Place Sundance liked   ETTA [Etta Place, his girl]   
It's done in parts of Switzerland   FINI [done = "c'est fini"]   
It was nothing for Louis XIV   RIEN [nothing = rien --- I know, I now, but it's a good one]   
Medium setting   SÉANCE   
   
BTW:   
Julia's "Ocean's Twelve" role   TESS [why would a reference to a minor character in an unwatchable, fourth rate movie be chosen over a great literary character --- or even a character from a most popular comic strip?]  [Lucy "Lawless role" as XENA at least tries to be clever.]   
   
All 26 letters including five X's in this puzzle!   
   
CES and NFLER are not fit for this game.   
   
   
RATING:   
Three grins = Loved it; Two grins = Enjoyed it; One grin = A bit bland for my taste; One teardrop = Not much fun   

[Thomps2525]

There are possibly 750,000 words in the English language (check out http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language ) and many crossword creators now use software programs to plot the fill words...so why are the same Crosswordese words still appearing so often? ADO, ALE, ATRA, IRA, IRE, OBOE, OLE, SEA, SSE, SST and dozens of others still show up in several puzzles each week, along with a large number of abbreviations and acronyms and foreign words and Roman numerals.

Today's puzzle included a J, a Z, two Qs and five Xs, but it also included ALTE, CES, ENTR', FINI, RIEN, SANS and SMA'. With three quarters of a million English words to choose from, why can't puzzle makers avoid using foreign words?