8:02. A gentle one from Harry this week, but none the worse for that. A nice puzzle with some neat surfacing readings and a number of well-crafted anagrams.
Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, deletions like this, anagram indicators are in italics.
| Across | |
| 1 | Food parcel and document a courier carries |
| TACO – contained in ‘document a courier’. The cryptic grammar here doesn’t work for me. ‘Document a courier carries’ isn’t, on its own, a valid wordplay indication for TACO, so the word ‘and’ needs to be either removed or replaced by ‘which’ or similar for the wordplay to work. That messes with the surface reading of course. | |
| 4 | Period with old chap suited high-flying lady |
| SPACEWOMAN – SPACE, W, O, MAN. SPACE: ‘an interval of distance or time between two points, objects, or events‘ (Collins, my emphasis). Excellent clue with a superbly misleading definition. | |
| 9 | Cream tea’s a tad unusual in a region of Chile |
| ATACAMA DESERT – (CREAM TEAS A TAD)*. | |
| 10 | Corrupt news chief to turn over documents |
| DEFILE – reversal of ED, FILE. | |
| 11 | Most whacky fan one’s seen during match |
| NUTTIEST – NUT, T(I)EST. | |
| 12 | Reliable hand? |
| STRAIGHT – DD. | |
| 14 | Line manager one suspended after losing head |
| ANGLER – |
|
| 15 | Resentful model dumping soprano for bishop |
| BITTER – SITTER with the S replaced by B. | |
| 17 | Dickens fan? |
| SATANIST – CD. ‘Dickens’ as a euphemism for the devil predates the novelist by at least a couple of centuries. | |
| 19 | Drop dead shortly after drinking last of beer |
| DECREASE – DEC( |
|
| 21 | One rooted for the general public, not the posh |
| POPLAR – POP |
|
| 23 | Don’t ring sweet fools in the British government |
| DOWNING STREET – (DONT RING SWEET)*. An address which also refers to the executive: strictly speaking only part of the government but close enough for, er, government work. | |
| 24 | I turn and reply improperly in a salacious way |
| PRURIENTLY – (I TURN REPLY)*. | |
| 25 | If temperature’s dropped, endure suffering cold? |
| SICK – S |
|
| Down | |
| 2 | Empty Argentine boxing club in decline |
| ABATE – A |
|
| 3 | Blown instrument in old car by hot area |
| OCARINA – O, CAR, IN, A. | |
| 4 | Nerve gas released outside cold roadside diner? |
| SCAVENGER – (NERVE GAS)* containing C. Another underlined question mark: other locations for scavenging are available. | |
| 5 | A time without profits can be challenging |
| AGAINST – A(GAINS), T. | |
| 6 | Wield authority, but not whilst holding power |
| EXERT – EX |
|
| 7 | Job vacancy in Split? |
| OPENING – DD. By crossword convention if a word can be capitalised in any given context (at the beginning of a sentence, for instance), then it can be capitalised in a clue, as Split is here. Similarly it would be OK to fully capitalise a word to make it look like an acronym (START, for instance) because words are sometimes presented like that, in newspaper headlines for instance. You’re not allowed to do it the other way around because the city in Croatia is never written ‘split’. Essentially the idea is that you can lift any element of a clue from its usual context and plonk it into the wordplay as a building block without regard to that usual context. Another common application of this principle is the presentation of one part of speech as another: for instance ‘decline’ in 2dn is a verb (defining ABATE) but is disguised as a noun in the wordplay. If you treat it as a verb the surface reading is gibberish (equivalent to ‘boxing club in fade’) but that doesn’t matter. | |
| 8 | Retired volunteers given samples and vouchers |
| ATTESTERS – reversal of TA, TESTERS. | |
| 13 | Dine later, after knocking together batter |
| TAILENDER – (DINE LATER)*. Not sure about this anagrind. | |
| 14 | A tiny path somehow is something to be avoided |
| ANTIPATHY – (A TINY PATH)*. ANTIPATHY can refer to both a feeling and ‘the object of such a feeling’ (Collins), which was news to me. | |
| 16 | One casting series collared by Oscarless extra |
| THROWER – |
|
| 17 | Reportedly lacking in strength, but cunning |
| SLEIGHT – sounds like ‘slight’. | |
| 18 | Small issue vasectomy surgeons initially ignored |
| NIPPERS – |
|
| 20 | A story about Elvis essentially still going strong? |
| ALIVE – A, LI( |
|
| 22 | Lorry is extremely cold (-1C) |
| ARTIC – AR |
|
Took me a while to remember OCARINA and then to parse as I was trying figure out why the ‘H’ for hot was in there before twigging that it was hot/hip/in. Quite a few gimmes in this, ATACAMA DESERT, NUTTIEST, and more along with a few head-scratchers to make it interesting. Thought SPACEWOMAN was very good for the high-flying lady but had a mer with space/period, so thanks for the info K. Took a while to see (D)ANGLER for line manager, strange phrase for a fisherman. And even longer to remember ‘What the Dickens/Devil’ for SATANIST. Enjoyed Downing Street. It’s a toss up for COD between SCAVENGER and ARTIC so we’ll make it a photo-finish, both great clues, one for misdirection (roadside diner) and the other for inventive wordplay.
Thanks K And setter.
DNF
Never got DECREASE. Didn’t see how SICK worked. DNK TAILENDER, of course. COD ARTIC.
I didn’t have any queries against any clues. NIPPERS made me chuckle. I thought ARTIC was clever. Much to enjoy here.
DNF. Never got DECREASE. I was completely poleaxed by this clue, despite finding the rest of the crossword quite doable and straightforward for a D. McLean. Even yesterday, looking at it for the umpteenth time, the best I could come up with was PEARLATE, on the basis of LATE being dead, but otherwise incomprehensible.
I toyed with TEARLATE, (late=dead, why tear?).
My thanks to David McLean and keriothe.
It wasn’t that hard but it took me a while.
1a POI TACO, Private Eye had this recently but clued by Trump Always Chickens Out, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out which was originally invented in the FT.
17a Satanist. Wiktionary specifies dickens=devil with a first date of 1590 to 1600 which seems oddly precise to me. I vaguely thought it might be Richard III who was known as Dickon, but too new for that, he died at Bosworth in 1453 from memory.
4d Scavenger, I was looking for something like a McDonalds for too long.
8d Attesters, DNK = vouchers. Wiktionary DNK that either.
DNF in 30
Another one poleaxed by DECEASED. Nice puzzle though I didn’t find it quite so gentle
Thanks Setter/Keriothe
I was reminded of TAILENDER recently (sure I’d seen it before that) when I had STING IN THE TAIL in one I blogged some Sundays ago (though that exact word isn’t mentioned there). Anyway, there are so few comments here, I felt I should say something!
Thank you! The site has been down for much of today, I’m telling myself that’s why there are so few comments 😉
15 minutes with no major issues.
Not sure I agree with the criticism of the clue for TACO (assuming I’ve understood it correctly). Is there a rule/convention with containment clues that the definition and the containment words shouldn’t be separated by anything?
FOI Abate
LOI Decrease
COD Artic
There is a modern convention that the “hiding place” in hidden word clues can only consist of words which include part of the answer. In the bad old days of the 1930s, we had hidden word clues close to the style now used in one round of Richard Osman’s House of Games – long phrases concealing multiple words of the right length, and I’m not sure that all of them had a definition. So I can understand the rule, but when I started as the ST xwd ed, I thought it a bit extreme and said I would allow one small extra word. I suspect the number of times the setters have used the opportunity is still in single digits. I later discovered that in the Ximenes book that was the first to set out clear rules rather than a few principles, his rule (end of Chapter 7) allowed setters to include an article. I’m happy with other words like “and” which simply help towards a smooth surface.
Thanks Peter. Point taken on containment: this is after all purely a question of convention so one is as good as another.
Re 1ac I think you miss my point. I don’t mind a filler word but ‘document a courier carries’ is not a valid indication of TACO.
Edit: sorry I was missing your point!
I don’t see the issue here – isn’t it (the word sequence) ‘document a courier’ (or ‘and document a courier’) carries ? Ie the phrase ‘document a courier’ carries ‘taco’.
Perhaps I’ve missed your point. (You probably won’t see this comment anyway!)
There’s no connection in the clue saying the word defined by “Food parcel” is found in the wordplay. “And” doesn’t do that, only implying that these two parts are simply equivalent; “which” would make this say that the “Food parcel” is “carried” by the other parts of the clue.
Keriothe will see your comment in an email notification. He’s probably not awake right now.
To put it another way, the clue needs somehow to say ‘word which document a courier carries’. The ‘word which’ part is missing, so the clue doesn’t make grammatical sense.
However I’ve just realised that I was missing the point made by Peter above, which is that he has allowed the word ‘and’ to be part of the containment fodder. There is an implied ‘which’ between ‘parcel’ and ‘and’.
Thanks – that “which” has to be implied, because the “which” which would make sense in the surface reading would be just after “document”, making “twhichaco” some of the hiding place, but not “taco”.
Yes indeed. A more succinct clue would be ‘food parcel that a courier carries.’ A ‘which’ or second ‘that’ has to be implied between ‘parcel’ and ‘that’. But such elision is quite common in ordinary English usage.
Peter, can you give an example of a clue with a long phrase concealing multiple words of the right length etc etc? I think I follow what you’re saying, but I’m not completely sure.
An example here would be ‘food parcel and secret document a courier carries’. Peter is allowing ‘and document a courier carries’ as containment fodder because ‘and’ (which does not contain any of the letters of the answer) is just a small filler word. He would not allow ‘and secret document a courier carries’.
Here’s one from the 1930 puzzle in the ST 100 years book:
Hidden in “He, at her most utter terror, leans at rest, leering at her sideways” (7)
I found 6 7-letter words – you can only use one of them when checking letters eliminate the others. That’s from the early days when indications like “anag.” (and “hidden” in a similar clue a few years later) were used in clues that weren’t properly cryptic. The “wrong” answers are listed in the notes about some clues with the solution . I suspect there are later hidden word clues in the book somewhere between that and the modern style, but if so, I haven’t spotted any explanations of them in solutions, probably because other clues more clearly needed explaining.
A (now) highly amusing approach to making a ‘hidden’ clue more difficult, contrasting with the modern approach of elegantly concealing that the answer is hidden. Such clues must have required quite an effort to compile.
Thanks, Peter.
10A. I couldn’t see why (plural) “documents” = (singular) “file”. But of course there is a well-known definition in Collins.
file:
-documents or information about a specific subject, person, etc
—we have a file on every known thief
(or I suppose something like “Please get me the Kim Philby file”.)
7D. Thanks for the explanation about capitalised words in clues. Very interesting and helpful.
An easy Sunday (well, 43 minutes with a break for wishing my 5 year old granddaughter Happy Birthday), but of the usual very high quality. My only problem was not knowing the region of Chile in 9ac and after seeing DESERT in the anagrist and so having four As and three consonants left to play with, discovering to my horror that every checked letter was one of the As and I would have to guess which of the six permutations of CMT would fill the unchecked squares. But with a very vague sense of what might be appropriate for Chile I did guess right, so I’m very pleased.
Like hydrochoos above, I didn’t recognise the name of the Chilean desert , but managed to put the consonants in the right places. It was 4a which held me up until the last, as I went through all the other types of high-flying ladies first ( trapeze acts, manageresses etc), and SICK ( which I just couldn’t see, as I was trying to find a 3-letter word for ‘endure’ to go around C – which of course couldn’t work. Otherwise a fairly straightforward puzzle ( for Dean) I thought; and glad to finish in one sitting. COD SCAVENGER.
What’s all the heavy weather with TACO? It’s a tortilla , i.e. a food parcel, and the letters are sitting in. i.e. carried by documenT A COurier
That’s exactly what the blog says, but if you follow the (slightly convoluted!) discussion you’ll find that it’s actually wrong. The word ‘and’ is part of the containment fodder, so TACO is actually contained in ‘and document a courier’. This is necessary for the cryptic grammar of the clue to work, but also against the rules of containment clues as some would have it. Peter takes a slightly (and perfectly legitimately) more liberal view of those rules.