Quick Cryptic no 3075 by Asp

I have a charming little book from my childhood describing how atoms are made up.  It is very much aimed at 8-10 year olds and bluntly states “Everything is made up of atoms and atoms are made up of three types of particles, called protons, electrons and neutrons”.  And in 1964 when the book was published, that was considered the last word.  Now, the Standard Model that physicists use contains a rather larger menagerie of particles, including quarks (which come in 6 “flavours”), leptons (also 6 types, including the electron and things like neutrinos), bosons, photons, gluons and so on.  In all there are at least 25 types, and quite possibly more to be discovered.  And no, I don’t know how many of them can be charged and so considered ions.

I’m not sure the wordplay here entirely works, as the use of the word “in” suggests an inclusion – but while I can make TIM…..E as the outside, EPIEC does not work as the included part.  Might one be bold enough to suggest to our esteemed crossword editor that “Watch US magazine with one article” would have been an acceptable alternative?

And a very nice surface, in which we have to lift and separate running and fast.  Stitches are indeed often caused by running fast, but not exclusively, as one can get stitches with a slow jog-trot – and to make the definition “Pain caused by running fast”, as I was initially tempted to do, would have asked the ST of fast to do double duty.

Of course George need not be a boy; it can be the name of a male of any age, and even these days a female name too, usually as a short form of Georgia or Georgina.  Although two famous female Georges in the literary world of the 19th century, George Eliot and George Sand, chose the name for rather different reasons:  George Eliot was the pen name of novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), who felt her work would be more readily accepted if she adopted a male persona, while George Sand (1804-1876), who was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, chose to be deliberately vague about her sex not only as a writer but in general life, wearing trousers and even smoking in public (not something ladies did).  Which prompted Victor Hugo to remark “George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother”.

One could quibble that breeding (ie producing babies) and raising (ie looking after then once born and turning them into responsible members of society) are rather different operations, and there are sadly examples of parents who are rather better at the former than the latter, but it is clear what Asp has in mind here.

Another quite imaginative indicator which I have not seen before, and am not sure I fully understand – does “group of” mean “part of”?  Perhaps “Sub-group of” might have been another way of putting it?

I am not sure there is any significance in Asp’s use of the spelling of caviar with an e at the end; the reference dictionaries I consulted all suggest that caviar is much the more common spelling in English, although they do add “caviare is also correct”.  All I can say is my spellchecker doesn’t like it, giving it the squiggly red underscoring.

Gunpowder is mainly a mixture of sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate, also known as saltpetre or nitre.  I am not sure why potassium nitrate has two common names, but it is the second one we want here.

In contract law, a representee is the person to whom a representation (ie a statement of fact) is made.  Not a word I knew, but the wordplay is very precise and enables one to construct the answer even without knowing the word.

Given the fuss yesterday about the word Soudanese, also not a word I knew and one I was on record as suggesting was not appropriate in a QC, I suspect I stand ready to be accused of double standards in not minding Representee at all.  But I think there is a difference between a word that I don’t know but which looks right, and one that I do know but which has a spelling that just looks wrong.

(Retires quickly before too many brickbats are thrown at me for reopening yesterday’s cause célèbre …)

Realm is having quite an outing at the moment; the word featured in QC 3068 by Teazel on 15 August, in QC 3061 by Jet Lag on 7 August and in QC 3038 by Asp himself on 11 July.  And on no less than 4 occasions in the 15×15 this year as well.