A phonetic puzzle by Woody Rowe:

Across

1. What mosquitoes do.
2. What snakes do.
3. What dogs do.
4. What teeth do.

Down:

1. Insects
2. Optical organs
3. Annoy
4. Comfort

The solution:

Get it? Remarkably, the same idea works in French:

Across

1. Que font les moustiques
2. Que font les chiens
3. Que font les serpents
4. Que font les dents

Down

1. aime
2. au
3. air
4. dé

cark
v. to worry

kedogenous
adj. produced by worry

Some of your hurts you have cured
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

— Emerson

bubulcitate
v. to cry like a cowboy

(That’s from Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary of 1623, so it doesn’t refer to a cowboy of the American West. What it does refer to is unclear. Cockeram said he included “even the mocke-words which are ridiculously used in our language,” but this word appears never to have been published outside of his dictionary, so we don’t know what a “cowboy” is or why he might cry. Make up your own meaning.)

AMERICAN is an anagram of CINERAMA.
MEXICAN is an anagram of CINEMAX.

lachschlaganfall
n. a condition in which a person falls unconscious due to violent laughter

USHERS contains five pronouns: HE, HER, HERS, SHE, US.

If rearranging letters is permitted, then SMITHERY contains 17: HE, HER, HERS, HIM, HIS, I, IT, ITS, ME, MY, SHE, THEIR, THEIRS, THEM, THEY, THY, YE.

tauromachy
n. the art of bullfighting