28018 Thursday, 1st July 2021 An interesting cocktail down the middle.

85 comments on “28018 Thursday, 1st July 2021 An interesting cocktail down the middle.”

1. I never even thought of BACKHANDER, and while I can see the ambiguity I feel that BACKHANDED is clearly the better solution. “Dubious description” is a very poor definition for “backhander”, and it leaves the awkward link word “of” sitting there doing nothing.
   1. Of often sits in the middle of a clue doing nothing. As does for. As does in. As does as. As for dubious description/backhander not being synonyms, I suspect that depends on your geographical location. Works perfectly here (but isn’t in the dictionaries).
      1. Yes, but ‘[wordplay] for [definition]’ or ‘[definition] as [wordplay]’ make some kind of sense. ‘[Definition] of [definition]’ does not make sense.
2. ….I found it a joyless experience, and I really can’t be bothered submitting online

   NHO DUST BUNNY, while BACKHANDED is a really dumb clue.

   However, my biggest gripe is with BIGAMY, which doesn’t really work on any level. If a man (just for example) marries two other persons simultaneously, the likelihood is that those two are blissfully unaware of the crime — so partners in crime they most certainly are not. And if we consider this bad man in isolation, he only has two partners, not a trio. Setter trying too hard to be clever IMHO.

   FOI LOAN
   LOI SANDMAN
   COD ARSENIC
   TIME 17:53

   1. I think you need to lift and separate the PARTNERS and the CRIME. Then CRIME is just the literal, and the PARTNERS are just that.
      1. I’ll buy that.
3. I was stuck there a good while because that definition of “size” did not come up under definitions for GUM, so I’m glad to know what was going on there. Also hesitated to put in SANDMAN for a long time, though I very much wanted to (it is, or was, my nom de chanson when I do/did numbers in English with—sigh—my olde karaoke krewe) till I twigged the parsing. Opted for BACKHANDED, and guessed it had something to do with some sport or other!
4. 16.10. I seem to have been on pretty good form today. It helped that I only saw backhanded and never even considered the alternative. The top half fairly flew in. A handful in the bottom half; camphor, ridgepole and sandman slowed me down though (I found it impossible to enter sandman and not think of the Metallica song). Suspicious deaths, left for the UK and the Victorian loo were all very good.
5. Bigamy doesn’t involve three partners though does it? Three individuals certainly, but unless you’re talking about consenting bigamy in states where it is permitted (and therefore not a crime), there is otherwise no relationship between two of the three parties. Indeed they’re almost always unaware of each other. (Mr Grumpy)
6. 55 minutes which I didn’t really enjoy, with overly oblique clues like the one for BIGAMY and a plethora of obscure but otherwise unexceptional ones like the ones for NEARSIDE and DUST BUNNY (I saw very quickly that the first word would be DUST, but couldn’t do anything with B???Y until I found the middle N). ARSENIC was very clever, but of course using the chemical symbol for it is almost a cliché. COD to NIGHTSHADE and the clever weaving of DEATHS into it.
7. Or, before you comment you could read the discussion, where this point was fully discussed
   1. I’m making a different point. In bigamy there are only two different partners for one individual.
      ‘Lifting and separating’ partners and crime in the clue still leaves an inaccurate ‘trio of partners’.

      That might be arguable in consenting or permitted bigamy where the two ‘bigamees’ form a de facto partnership in furtherance of their own interests. But then if it’s not a crime in the first place, it’s a redundant discussion. (Mr Grumpy)

8. I was another BACKHANDER so a pink square. I never even thought twice about it since it didn’t occur to me that it didn’t mean a backhanded compliment.
9. 13:48 but another BACKHANDER. Grr.
10. Right, and Collins tells us that a backhander is a backhanded comment.
    1. But not a dubious description. Whereas Chambers clearly says dubious can be a synonym for backhanded. I defer to both. You seem to defer to neither.

       But, really, there are only so many times we can repeat ourselves to no effect. Let’s call it a day.

       1. You won’t find ‘dodgy’ in the definition for ‘iffy’, or vice versa, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t synonyms. The word ‘dubious’ doesn’t appear in other definitions of ‘backhanded’. The fact that the Collins definition of backhander doesn’t include the word ‘dubious’ is neither here nor there. It’s the nounal equivalent of backhanded, so if you accept it in one context I can see no reason not to accept it in the other. If a backhanded comment is a dubious comment, then so is a backhander.
          I’m not questioning that BACKHANDED is a valid answer (it’s what I put) but I can see no reason to disallow BACKHANDER, as you seem to want to do based on a misguidedly slavish devotion to the particular words used in a particular dictionary.
11. Worse than my usual 1.5 days but liked it well enough in the end. Another backhander but also a left-hander so always likely to lean the wrong way. Did not know dust bunny or sandman (although easily guessed). Can’t think of a common abbreviation using Br (instead of B) for British (instead of Britain).

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