What I will say about this is that I breezed through in 12.48, at the same time feeling like I was being particularly clever with the words and wordplay, with some of them being from the dustier corners of the dictionary, and with at least two of answers where I was unaware of the meanings, though the individual words were familiar.
So very much a good experience for me, with my favourite clue of the day the UED at 20 across, but the whole thing was a pleasure, with tidy, mostly concise clues.
Definitions underlined in italics, [letters] to be left out, component part in CAPITALS.
| Across | |
| 1 | Officer back with tea (6,4) |
| SECOND MATE – On board ship. Back is SECOND, tea is the Paraguayan MATE, sometimes spelled with a É. | |
| 6 | Friend attending Mass this Sunday? (4) |
| PALM – Friend is PALM, add M[ass]. The emphatic this indicates you’re looking for a particular Sunday in the Christian calendar, the one before Easter. | |
| 9 | I get out with difficulty after salesman turns blue (10) |
| PERIWINKLE – This version is the blue shade of the flowers of a woodland evergreen plant. I WINKLE is a version of I get out with difficulty, which comes after a reversed (turns) REP for salesman. | |
| 10 | One in front resembling a peacock (4) |
| VAIN – “Proud as a peacock”: place a digit I in VAN for front. | |
| 12 | Universal Earth mentor? Fantastic! (6,6) |
| MOTHER NATURE – Close enough to an &lit: an anagram (fantastic) of U[niversal] EARTH MENTOR | |
| 15 | Buffoon, one of several appearing together on short London street (9) |
| HARLEQUIN – Perhaps a slightly different meaning of buffoon from the bumbling fool: Chambers has “a person who sets out to amuse others by jests, grimaces, etc”, which is pretty close to the astute and nimble character from the Commedia dell’Arte in his diamond pattern costume. One of several (5, in fact) appearing (more or less) together is a QUIN, tagged on to HARLE[Y] Street, our shortened London street inhabited by mostly pricier doctors. | |
| 17 | Tedium something of an unspoken nuisance (5) |
| ENNUI – Hidden (something of) in unspokEN NUIsance | |
| 18 | Mike in unresponsive state? Just a short break (5) |
| COMMA – M[ike] (NATO alphabet) in COMA, an unresponsive state. | |
| 19 | Wait here for food, money and some coke, possibly (5,4) |
| BREAD LINE – Money gives BREAD, and some coke gives a LINE, which I believe is how consumers arrange the white stuff before nostrilisation. | |
| 20 | Withdrawing name for a post in religious organisation? (12) |
| DENOMINATION – A bit of Uxbridge: if you put up a name for a post it’s a NOMINATION, to withdraw it put DE in front. | |
| 24 | Judge of the Bible not available for foreign author (4) |
| GIDE – André, French Nobel laureate. The judge of the Bible is GIDEON. If a dish is not available, it’s not ON, so remove it. | |
| 25 | A share certificate, not one arranged for credit (10) |
| ASCRIPTION – As in some of the Psalms are ascribed to King David. A, plus SCRIP for a share certificate, plus an anagram (arranged) of NOT I. | |
| 26 | Seabird’s opportunity to be heard (4) |
| TERN – A straightforward sound charade, sounds like TURN, opportunity. | |
| 27 | Vaguely indicated a beat: cued at last, drum messed up (10) |
| ADUMBRATED – An anagram (messed up) where you have to assemble the material: A BEAT plus the last of [cue]D plus DRUM. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Concessions for high voices? (4) |
| SOPS – Double definition, the second short for SOP[rano]S. | |
| 2 | Caterpillar maybe avoiding hill, climbs barrow (4) |
| CART – A TRACTOR may have caterpillar tracks, remove the TOR hill, and reverse (climbs). | |
| 3 | Pristine toy soldiers, participants in civil war (3,5,4) |
| NEW MODEL ARMY – As organised by Cromwell to become an effective Parliamentarian fighting force. Straight word swaps. | |
| 4 | Chewy artist? (5) |
| MUNCH – Edvard, he of The Scream, presumably caused by chewing a toffee with a leaky tooth. | |
| 5 | Well done: in a daze, showing patience (9) |
| TOLERANCE – OLÉ is, of course, well done in Spanish, inserted into TRANCE for daze. | |
| 7 | A chap has troublesome issue about new copyist (10) |
| AMANUENSIS – The apostle Paul did not write his letter to the Romans, his amanuensis Tertius did – fun pub quiz question. A chap gives A MAN, followed by an anagram (troublesome) of ISSUE with N[ew] included. | |
| 8 | Three-card trick on film is capital (10) |
| MONTEVIDEO – Capital of Uruguay, but you knew that. MONTE is a Mexican variation on find the lady, the universal con man’s three-card trick. Film is VIDEO. | |
| 11 | I might be hearing “icicle”, apparently (12) |
| EAVESDROPPER – An icicle hangs or drops from the eaves. | |
| 13 | Restrain part of hand that is a bit redundant (5,5) |
| CHECK DIGIT – From computing (and Chambers) “A redundant bit in a stored word, used in a self-checking procedure such as a parity check”. CHECK from restrain, DIGIT part of a hand. I didn’t know the term, but easily surmised from the wordplay. | |
| 14 | One walking along composing porn? Dear me! (10) |
| PROMENADER – An anagram (composing) of PORN DEAR ME. | |
| 16 | Exiled without husband after old city became more industrial (9) |
| URBANISED – The old city is UR, followed by BANISHED for exiled without its H[usband]. | |
| 21 | Article missing its last odd loose thread (5) |
| THRUM – That’ll be TH[e] plus RUM for odd. I didn’t known this meaning of thrum, but it checks out. | |
| 22 | In good condition to cover area in short order (4) |
| FIAT – A very precise definition (2nd in Chambers). In good condition is FIT, insert A[rea]. | |
| 23 | Woman’s death overcoming one (4) |
| ENID – Death is END, insert I. | |
48 minutes. There were a few gifts but most clues needed some thinking through.
I knew the word ADUMBRATED but not what it meant, however it eventually fell out of the anagrist.
NHO ASCRIPTION, nor of the share certificate element of wordplay, but somehow I came up with it as a possible (if unknown) word that fitted the checkers. I was rather surprised afterwards to find that it’s the only word that fits, and having looked it up in a dictionary the definition didn’t obviously seem to tally with the one in the clue.
NHO CHECK DIGIT.
I really liked EAVESDROPPER although I’ve a feeling we’ve had something very similar in the past with reference to icicles.
At the start this seemed a lot harder than it turned out to be, and as it happened the NW was the last section to fall when SECOND MATE helped provide SOPS, CART and MUNCH. Do munch and chewy equate? The defs for HARLEQUIN and PERIWINKLE, plus the NHO CHECK DIGIT, held me up but I managed it in 27.24 which I’ll take on the day. Nice puzzle, thank you Z.
From Hurricane:
How could the life of such a man
Be in the PALM of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make you feel ashamed
To live in a land, where justice, is a game
‘Chewy artist’ needs to be taken as one to define MUNCH.
22:36
I seemed to be biffing everything, in a couple of cases only parsing post-submission. Is a FIAT necessarily short? LOI CART.
It’s ‘area in short’ = a, I think.
I thought of that once I thought of questioning Z’s underlining; but area=a is fine, so ‘short’ would seem to be merely for the sake of the surface.
That 2nd definition in Chambers is: a short order or warrant of a judge for making out or allowing processes, letters patent, etc. The more normal meaning of a papal decree and such wouldn’t need the “short”, but I think our setter is being particular.
Okay, thanks. My version seemed okay so I never got round to investigating FIAT. I should have known that as blogger you would have researched it if you’d been in any doubt.
FWIW though, we have had examples such as ‘n’ or ‘no’ clued as ‘small number’ before now so it’s not unusual for setters to indicate an abbreviation if it makes the surface smoother.
Area=a is fine. Area in short=a is also fine.
Fiat lux!
(Let there be light)
Your car is posher than mine.
FIAT LUX was my school motto … at least we would all leave knowing two words in latin.
We had AMANUENSIS not so long ago and I managed to remember it with the help of the starting ‘aman’. DNF though with PERIWINKLE and HARLEQUIN unknown. I thought MOTHER NATURE was very clever. I managed to get ASCRIPTION but had no idea what it meant. COD to DENOMINATION.
Thanks Z and setter.
NHO CHECK DIGIT or (if memory serves) WINKLE or NEW MODEL ARMY.
But the thing that held me up the longest, oddly enough, was my LOI, CART.
A lot of distractions! Ha.
11’55”.
I do not think a CHECK DIGIT can be described as ‘redundant’, even if Chambers says so. Things would very quickly get in a mess if e.g. bar codes didn’t have check digits. Fun task: find a book published before 2007 for which the last digit of its ISBN is ‘X’. Then explain why.
Thanks z and setter.
I was going to say much the same regarding CHECK DIGIT.
Ah, but in information theory terms the check digit itself is literally redundant information, in that it can be calculated from the rest of the information. The redundancy is what makes it helpful.
Astonished that several NHO check digit, but it is all down to experience. I have been a customs officer and a programmer etc, and every airwaybill has one CD (the remainder after dividing the first 7 chars by 7) and a VAT number has the last 2 CDs as the remainder after dividing by 93 (I think; it was all a long time ago.) But CDs are used in all the industries I ever came across in a longish IT-sales career.
A long time for me too. I think (underlined) it was along the lines of successively multiplying the first seven digits of the VAT number by 9, 8, 7 etc – or possibly by 1, 2, 3 etc – and then adding. Using modular arithmetic on the result with modulus 97 (the highest two-digit prime) gives a number which constitutes the final two VAT number digits, and so provides a check on the validity of the other seven integers. Anyone with a supermarket sales invoice to hand can easily check this!
Obviously
12 minutes on the dot, so back on the horse. Nothing entirely unknown, although AMANUENSIS sent a shiver down my spine. CHECK DIGIT was my LOI – I plucked GIDE/GIDEON from somewhere, then was expecting it to end in -IGHT until the fun DENOMINATION fell into place.
I think we have three instances of ‘one’ = I, which might be a record (VAIN, ENID, ASCRIPTION)
Thanks both.
Around 50 minutes. Starting was slow but there was no problem with the short words as yesterday. FOI MOTHER NATURE. LOI ENID. Liked PERIWINKLE, ASCRIPTION, NEW MODEL ARMY and MONTEVIDEO
Thanks Z.
24:09. I was well off the wavelength with this one – I expected the SNITCH to reflect this being very hard, only to find it was merely of average difficulty. In the end I was pleased just to make it over the line, finishing with EAVESDROPPER, where I had been so expectant that the answer would begin with WATER that I wondered if a WATERDROPPER was a thing until the penny finally dropped.
34 minutes with LOI ASCRIPTION, remembering what a scrip dividend is. DNK CHECK DIGIT. I did think of EAVESDROPPER early but wasn’t sure enough to put it in until later. COD to AMANUENSIS although I thought the word meant more than copyist, thinking of a Boswell. Not as difficult as it looked. Thank you Z and setter.
27:01 (but 1 error)
FOI: CART
LOI: MONTEVIDEO
22 minutes with 2 clues unsolved. I did not know CHECK DIGIT and opted for THICK when a little more thought would likely have been rewarded. And took about 5 minutes over LOI. Very enjoyable.
Thank you, Zabadak and the setter.
O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves
(Geraint and Enid, Tennyson)
35 mins pre-brekker, so quite chewy in parts. I was glad to know bother Gideon and Gide, but didn’t know Thrum was a loose thread.
A slight MER at the editor allowing the extra ‘an’ in the hidden word fodder.
Ta setter and Z.
I thought the same about the extra ‘an’. If I squint a bit I can justify it by imaging a group of [unspoken nuisance]s and interpreting the wordplay as an instruction to take out part of one of them.
DNF, defeated by MONTEVIDEO and GIDE. I’ve no excuse for the former: I was fixated on ‘film’ giving ‘ET’ as it often does, and my world capital cities trawl didn’t extend far enough. I’ve never heard of the latter, and even though I thought of Gideon, I didn’t know he was a judge.
– Didn’t know PERIWINKLE as blue
– Couldn’t see how MOTHER NATURE worked
– Didn’t know scrip as a share certificate, so ASCRIPTION went in from checkers
– Had heard of ADUMBRATED without knowing what it means
Thanks Zabadak and setter.
COD Bread line
Snap. I gave up on Montevideo and Gide. The latter was galling since I have a degree in French and German – but it was a long time ago.
Several short today. Did not see CART, but thought caterpillar could be GRUB, then reversed for BURG (hill). NHO the tea MATE.
COD MOTHER NATURE, great clue.
I think BURG is fortress/castle while BERG is mountain/hill.
Went astray by going straight for BACON rather than MUNCH for the Chewy artist (4d)
15.30 with LOI cart. Wasted a bit of time trying to fit davey into the street clue😉 Lots to like with the unknown check digit being very generously clued. Enjoyed this so thanks setter , not forgetting our admirable blogger .
DNF. Just couldn’t see Montevideo 🙁
Thanks, Z.
Definitely not at my best today! I took 24:10 with a couple of minutes needed at the end for my LOI EAVESDROPPER. Gosh I was slow to cotton on to that one! Good puzzle with some nice tricky cluing but nothing too hard.
Thanks setter and blogger
I was on the setter’s wavelength here, and wondered if this might be a David MacLean puzzle. NHO ASCRIPTION, but luckily had heard of a scrip dividend. I knew of AMANUENSIS from music studies long ago, where Eric Fenby notably fulfilled the role for Delius. Apart from my COD, I also enjoyed MOTHER NATURE.
FOI SECOND MATE
LOI ASCRIPTION
COD EAVESDROPPER
TIME 6:49
From SOPS to CHECK DIGIT in 17:51. The digital world would quickly fall apart without check digits, but if the original encoded data is correct then the information will survive without it. Some unusual words but very fair wordplay. Thanks setter and Z.
Threw in the towel at 50 mins with the NHO ASCRIPTION and EAVESDROPPER missing. Shame about the latter, because it’s a great clue. Some tricky ones here. NHO THRUM or MONTE in those meanings, but guessed them. FIAT was a sly one. NHO CHECK DIGIT either, but bunged it in because it worked.
14:39. I really enjoyed this. I found it MUNCH-like in exactly the right kind of way: familiar words with cunning wordplay and unfamiliar words (or familiar words with unfamiliar meanings) clearly and unambiguously indicated.
I had an odd experience with 8dn. I knew exactly which capital city I was after, and could even picture it on a map (it has a quite distinctive position at the southernmost tip of Uruguay) but just couldn’t bring the word to mind.
I tend to remember its name because it is so obvious that it is such a long way from the Andes that there NO WAY you can see them from there.
Also Battle of the River Plate, as blogger referred.
16:20 – fat-fingered my way through on an iphone keyboard. The puzzle seemed straightforward, the typing considerably less so. MOTHER NATURE was a cracker.
21 minutes, but not really. At 20 minutes it was all done except for the capital, which I just couldn’t think of so resorted to a list of capital cities and then regretted not taking just a bit longer on it. I did vaguely know monte, and the film The Battle of the River Plate should have got me there, since it’s no doubt on video and was based near Montevideo. Nice crossword, where all the tricky words (like thrum, which was at the back of my mind) were clearly clued.
22 mins, however GIDE completely defeated me and I had to get help to complete. Other than that, nice mixture of NHO words with very helpful clues.
37:10
Lots of scratching around today with plenty of unknown/forgotten bits:
MATE – took a long time to think of this even though I’d bunged in SECOND thirty minutes earlier.
PERIWINKLE – no idea that this is a shade of blue, but the answer was plain enough from three checkers
MOTHER NATURE – needed the H checker (fourth checker for me) to finally see the answer.
GIDE – LOI – vaguely aware of the name but didn’t understand the parsing for removing ON from GIDEON
ASCRIPTION – NHO this word. Heard of SCRIP a long time ago, but still had trouble calling it to mind.
ADUMBRATED – always forget what this means. Eventually understood which words made up the anagrist and got this from three checkers
CHECK DIGIT – my POI. Took ages to think of DIGIT as part of hand
THRUM – didn’t know this meaning of the word
AMANUENSIS – another word that I can forget the meaning of
FIAT – shrug
MONTEVIDEO – eventually from four checkers
Not my finest hour/37 minutes
Thanks Z and setter
DNF this felt like I was doing a barred puzzle. Didn’t know: AMANUENSIS, but could see wordplay, ASCRIPTION or ADUMBRATED. Worked out CHECK DIGIT, but hadn’t heard of it.
I did get the capital city and the officer though.
Lots of knowledge gaps today.
Thank you Z and setter
What does Zabadak mean by “the ‘UED’ at 20 Across”?
please explain.
The Uxbridge English Dictionary, which is a fictional dictionary of made-up ‘punny’ words from the radio show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.
Thank you, Amoeba.
Though the definitions are fictional, the book itself exists and can be purchased.
12a Missed the anagram for Mother N. Doh! Had Mother Figure for a bit.
4d M?n?? had to be Monet or Manet didn’t it? To be fair Edvard M is very well known. Delayed me on Mother N.
23d Enid; I had Maid for a while (pencil only) from Ma (woman), I=1, D=dead but that used woman in both def and wordplay.
25a Ascription; the word had to exist but it isn’t on the tip of my tongue often. Lucky to recognise the word “scrip” as I never owned a share in my life.
27a Adumbrated; Had Heard Of, but didn’t know what it meant; I’ll try to use it tomorrow.
21d DNK that meaning of thrum. Nor did Mrs F; I tend to assume that the fair sex knows everything about knitting & needlework but “it ain’t necessarily so.”
Sorry; added the one above twice in error. Didn’t know that could happen.
FOI PALM and LOI EAVESDROPPER. Some tricky vocab and cluing but about average difficulty I would say, time: 25:18.
19.30.
I thought this was quite hard and had I not been on a plane for 2 hours I would probably have given up. Unfortunately failed with the NHO FIAT. Put MINT without knowing why.
17’48” with too long on MONTEVIDEO and CART. Got fixated with CATERPILLAR being in French (and therefore possibly in obscure English) CHENILLE, which annoying has the letters for HILL in it. Stupid thought. 24 ac made me think initially of GIDEA as in GIDEA PARK (GIDE plus A for available). But GIDEA I see has nothing to do with GIDEON. Thanks.
Thank you to Z. Your blog is so helpful for those of us still learning the tricks of a cryptic crossword, and the dry humour is a treat too!
As a regular Mephisto solver, I had PAWN at 10ac – fourth definition in Chambers, and man in chess player’s front rank – with MER at ‘resembling’.
I’d at least try a referral at the Championship!
39:16
Needed pencil and paper to get MOTHER NATURE. Needed the H to finally see my LOI MUNCH, having toyed with MANET and MONET, and dismissed both for not being chewy.
NHO GIDE.
Thanks Z and setter
74:17. one of those ‘not on the setter’s wavelength’ days. Enjoyable nonetheless, and some clever clueing. NHO quite a few, which made for some slow parsing. Thanks Z and setter!
Ditto
Got there in the end despite a few words I knew existed but, if asked out of the blue, couldn’t tell you what they meant, such as ADUMBRATED but I think there were a couple more. No problem with CHECK DIGIT and surprised that people haven’t heard of it. I learned about how ISBN number check digits worked in an A-level math class (I have no idea what the topic was, I don’t think we studied error-correcting codes even in our group theory course). So I know what X as the check digit means since it is base-11!
A few too many unknown definitions here: AMANUENSIS, ASCRIPTION, CHECK DIGIT, CART to make this a pleasure to work. But I muddled through somehow, with a few look -ups, and was pleased with what I did actually know! Don’t think I would ever equate MUNCH and chew, but …